The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune: Prospects for Prosperity in Our Times 9781529221770

Table of contents :
Front Cover
The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune: Prospects for Prosperity in Our Times
Copyright information
Dedication
Epigraph
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Table
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Introduction
Why luck? And why now?
Against strict luck egalitarianism
Qualified esteem for luck egalitarianism
For equality-promoting approaches
The agenda in this book
2 The Egalitarian Turn in Liberalism
The problem of social inequality
How private property regimes alienate
Issues of basic-fundamental justice
Repairing markets
The arbitrariness of fortune
3 Where Liberalism Falls Short
The end and return of history
Further critiques of liberal social theory
Avoiding ontological politics
Tensions in intersubjective agreement
Procedures are not enough
A liberal social imaginary
Enrolling Marxian methodologies
4 The Problem of Contingency
Williams and contingency
Extreme epistemic uncertainty
Fortitude, wisdom, responsibility and self-affirmation
Fallibility and fragility
Making do with luck
5 Accounting for Uncertain Opportunities
Moral luck and responsibility
Equality and fair shots at prospects
Libertarian objections to equality
Is the partiality of the rich reasonable?
The costs of acquired tastes
Luck neutralization
6 A Social Analysis of Institutional Luck
Matters of production and consumption
The allocation of risk
Trust and distrust
Precarious ways of life
Institutional luck as power and mystification
7 Markets Are Not Morally Neutral
Inequality, incomes and prices
Some limitations of Marxism
Value struggle beyond Marxism
A reconstructed critique of political economy
8 Conclusion: The Tasks of Engaged Liberal Social Theory
Sources for renewal
Beyond the initial chances in life
The capability-priority principle
Equality-promoting approaches for democratic life
References
Index

Citation preview

Carin Runciman, University of Edinburgh

“Timcke presents a cogent and compelling argument showing the structural opportunism of luck in shaping our understanding of the nature of distributional justice.” Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University

Scott Timcke is Senior Research Associate with Research ICT Africa.

Luck greatly influences a person’s quality of life. Yet little of our politics looks at how institutions can amplify good or bad luck that widens social inequality. But societies can change their fortunes. Too often debates about inequality focus on the accuracy of data or modelling while missing the greater point about ethics and exploitation. In the wake of growing disparity between the 1% and other classes, this book combines philosophical insights with social theory to offer a much-needed political economy of life chances.

SCOT T T I M C KE

Timcke advances new thought on the role luck plays in redistributive justice in 21st century capitalism.

T HE PO LIT IC A L ECO NO MY OF FORT UN E AND M ISFORT UN E

“Timcke’s book is a theoretically sophisticated engagement with the concepts of luck, inequality and justice; what these mean under capitalism; and, crucially, what they could mean in the pursuit of social justice. A timely read that critically engages and expands the conceptual, philosophical and political boundaries.”

ISBN 978-1-5292-2175-6

9 781529 221756

B R I S TO L

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

@policypress

T HE P O L I T I C AL ECO N O MY O F FO RT UN E AN D M I S FO RT UN E P ROS P ECT S FOR P ROS P E RI T Y I N OU R T I ME S S COT T TI M C KE

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORTUNE AND MISFORTUNE Prospects for Prosperity in Our Times Scott Timcke

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 374 6645 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2023 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-2175-6 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-2176-3 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-2177-0 ePdf The right of Scott Timcke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Namkwan Cho Front cover image: shutterstock/​Drummer_​vn Bristol University Press use environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To the memory of John Gordon Humphries and John David Timcke

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-​around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-​operative wealth flow more abundantly –​only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

Contents List of Figures and Table Acknowledgements Preface

viii ix x

1 Introduction 2 The Egalitarian Turn in Liberalism 3 Where Liberalism Falls Short 4 The Problem of Contingency 5 Accounting for Uncertain Opportunities 6 A Social Analysis of Institutional Luck 7 Markets Are Not Morally Neutral 8 Conclusion: The Tasks of Engaged Liberal Social Theory

1 21 38 59 78 97 115 139

References Index

149 160

vii

List of Figures and Table Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3

Wealth shares, United States, 1962–​2016 The relationship between worker productivity and hourly compensation, 1948–​2020 Wages for top 1.0%, top 0.1% and bottom 90%, 1947–​2020

3 5 6

Table 5.1

A taxonomy of policies affecting inequality

viii

91

Acknowledgements At crucial stages in the writing of the book, Rick Gruneau made suggestions that greatly improved the text and sharpened the argument. Same too for Gary McCarron. Both helped to ground the abstractions in the social question. The best parts of the book reflect encounters I have had with their thoughts. Over the course of nearly a decade, collegial thanks go to Roy Bender, Beverley Best, Jessica Byron, Fiona Crawford, Maarit Forde, Levi Gahman, Mirjam Gollmitzer, Charmaine Gomes, P.I. Gomes, Matthew Greaves, Shane Gunster, Mariana Jarkova, Michael Jeffress, Brad King, Priya Kissoon, Brian Kootte, Derek Kootte, Graham MacKenzie, David Mastey, Jay McKinnon, Mike Mowbray, Stuart Poyntz, Fritz Schoon, Graeme Webb and Ben Woo, among others. Mark Kingwell provided early comments and directions. Victoria Pittman saw merit in the project and supported it at vital points while Shannon Kneis has provided a steady editorial hand. Thanks are due to Anna Richardson, Inga Boardman and the other team members at Bristol University Press. I deeply appreciate the reviewers’ remarks and well as their efforts to bring out the best version of this project. The final portion of this book was written with the support of a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. Special thanks are due to Esther Laufer and Andrea Porsfeld for collegiality. Equally productive has been my association with Carin Runciman and the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. My parents, Dennis and Diana Timcke, models for fairness, deserve special mention for their encouragement throughout the completion of this project. More recently, Shelene Gomes has been cheering on the final lap. When the proverbial legs were tiring, her support was vital to finish strong.

ix

Preface There are some priors I wish to discuss before embarking on the main argumentation in this book, which is to show that freedom comes through social and material equality. This outcome especially applies when accounting for the role of contingency in forming social inequalities in the first place, as well as for the need to account for luck in redistributive justice. Luck is intimately related to how opportunities are structured and mystified in capitalism, and how this in turn affects both well-​being and relations of domination. Given this set of concerns, a good portion of the book attends to debates involving a mode of reasoning called luck egalitarianism, which is firmly grounded in both the classical egalitarian aspirations of non-​subordination and orthodox liberal conceptions of self-​determination. This mode of reasoning has clear aspirations to apply moral criteria to political ideas about redistributive justice, meaning that it does not endorse systems that naturalize and institutionalize the results of contingency, which I define as knowing that beliefs are historically situated and socially conditioned. Through insisting that a fair and equal society would not leave a person to fate, luck egalitarianism seeks to create morally respectable politics. In this sense, persons share a society with others and their fates are entwined. To my mind this requires building new institutions. While there is wisdom in borrowing from the old, it is not enough to try to rehabilitate our current institutions through new charters. While I have much sympathy for luck egalitarianism and its analytical Marxian tributaries, ultimately my tack in this book is on ‘equality-​ promoting approaches’ which also derive from texts like the Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx 1999). These later approaches can also attend to the role of luck in shaping capabilities and needs, as well as the history of both of these things. To my mind, Marxian equality-​promoting approaches focus on the totality of the production, circulation and consumption of goods as they can be leveraged to satisfy human needs. This broader view can help in the analysis of durable and qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrable social inequalities, as well as how these inequalities are sustained institutionally and reproduced ideologically. x

Preface

Through advocating for what I term the ‘capability-​priority principle’, this book provides a sympathetic critique of the ‘liberal view of the world’. There are certainly many good, comprehensive critiques of liberalism using Marxian, Foucauldian and the Mbembean approaches, as well as narrower ones that indict its relative inattentiveness to ‘race’, class and gender. Yet, even keeping in mind these excellent critiques, liberal thought has redeeming elements. Its principles have helped produce the characteristics of a modern democracy like constitutionalism, separation of powers, due process and judicial review, a doctrine of rights, a free press, checks and balances, periodic institutional accountability, the scrutiny of office and officeholders and open political offices, as well as genuine electoral contests to discipline the partiality of officeholders. C. Wright Mills certainly had much to say of the value of liberal ideals, going as far as to write that they are ‘viable, and even compelling’. The problem, Mills writes, is that these ideas are ‘divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization’ (1963, 191). For example, the labour movement won concessions for minimum wages, the standard eight-​hour workday, the 40-​ hour workweek and overtime pay, as well as forcing the establishment of institutions to check gender and racial discrimination. And so, without the counterpart of ‘ruthless critique’ (see Marx 1843), liberal thought may be ill-​suited for the situations in the 21st century. Without the keystone of equality, 21st-​century constitutions, institutions and ‘higher lawmaking’ (Ackerman 1993) will inevitably weaken. But attempts to bring egalitarian concerns to the forefront in liberal thought will not succeed without more attention given to phenomena like the capitalist mode of production, the political consequences of private property regimes and other problems caused by exploitation arising from the extraction of surplus value from labour, as those features come to shape a person’s fortunes and misfortunes. Sadly, these aspects of the ‘social question’ receded from the liberal agenda as liberals turned to the market to deliver social goods in the neoliberal era. As Elizabeth Popp Berman (2022) has argued, this is because ‘efficiency replaced equality in U.S. public policy’. As neoliberalism was a polycentric project (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010), Popp Berman’s conclusion holds for many other Western societies too. Indeed, after much popular frustration with decades of capitalism trumping democracy, several major ‘anti-​systems politics’ parties are currently gaining ground across Europe and North America (Hopkin 2020). These kinds of studies are credible. But there is scope for more radical explanations. To my mind, liberals have difficulty with the social question partly because of their inattention to value struggles, and because in the United States liberal democracy is more a ‘formal outline than an actuality’, to invoke Mills’ words again (1963, 259). But historical materialism can offer a methodological correction that can help dispense xi

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

with the hierarchies of credentialed achievement that maintain the myth of meritocracy. When this happens, I believe the liberal view of the world can help produce a political theory that can gain relevance in our times. As my interest is with what liberalism can become, there are some important debates that I will not relitigate in the book. One is the question of the comprehensiveness of liberalism. At stake is whether second-​order investigations can assist first-​order determinations. Philosophical liberals hold that second-​order investigations and evidence-​based inquiry can adjust first-​ order judgements. Political liberals hold that if there are risks of implementing existing second-​order consensus then liberalism should concern itself solely with procedural politics. Holding an adjacent position, public reason liberals argue that comprehensiveness does not respect the subjectivity of freely reasoning autonomous moral-​titled persons to judge what is good. They propose that moral conduct needs to be publicly justified. That Rawls was swayed by each of these positions over the course of his career shows the influence of each. While sympathetic to the version of liberal moral universalism expounded by writers like Thomas Pogge (2002) and Martha Nussbaum (2002), as well as the kind of limited Kantianism consistent in Rawls’ early intellectual arc, I lean towards the political version, akin to what Rawls presents in Political Liberalism (1993). I am perturbed by the idea of philosopher-​as-​ legislator, because no single entity should be able to stipulate the good for an entire community. Indeed, the polysemy of meaning ensures that no final vocabularies are possible, no decisions are fundamental. Furthermore, even suggestions that the only valid moral universalism is the one generated out of the historically situated reasoning of a community neglects scholarship within the Frankfurt and decoloniality schools, which demonstrates how often claims of universal moral reason are actually partial. Along a similar line, in a plural society coercion cannot be justified by appeals to religious systems either. Indeed, one of the core attributes of freedom of consciousness that Richard Rorty (1990) observed is that it provides a way for people to keep their metaphysical presumptions to themselves. This tenet can help ensure that the public sphere is a place of politics, not bitter confrontation between irresolvable metaphysical commitments. While it is true that people have deep convictions, it is also possible for people who do not share them to live well together. This is especially important given how heterogeneous societies expand further due to migration to escape the effects of the climate emergency, a phenomenon that will only become more widespread in the decades ahead regardless of how militarized borders become. There is another debate in which I will simply state my position. This is the issue of so-​called moral neutrality in the face of the conflict of values. As a matter of pragmatism, procedural liberals have at times ‘set aside’ moral xii

Preface

questions by engaging with issues as a matter of law (see Nagel 2006). But one must not confuse workarounds and delegations with resolutions. Sooner or later these conflicts reappear. Michael Sandel (2006) makes a compelling point when he highlights how the principles of basic rights and liberties cannot be neutral, as they cut to substantive moral controversies. While liberalism is first and foremost a political theory, it does have (limited) metaphysical and epistemological commitments. But these commitments are not static either. Like any set of ideas, liberalism responds to (and is formed by) the social developments of its day. As it has been made, so liberalism can be remade, altering these limited commitments to fit situations, as Rawls’ conception of reflective equilibrium alludes to. The kind of adaptability I have in mind is necessary because, as Rawls notes, ‘permanent pluralism’ is a fact of modern democracies; its negation is likely only to come from the ‘oppressive use of state power’ (1999, 445), a wholly repugnant event. Pluralism makes the politics of moderate scarcity acute, but through ‘well-​organized social cooperation’ and fairness, societies can ensure the gains are justly shared. This method allows societies to find ‘mutually acceptable’ institutions (Rawls 1999, 306). These are qualifiers for Rawls’ theory of justice; that his model is historically situated within modernity, its natural and social sciences, and the concurrent humanistic causal imagination that deals with current predicaments. Rawls’ early work maintained that there can be good reasons why people might disagree. Similarly, there will be inevitable disagreements over conflicts of value and conviction, even under favourable social and political conditions and among reasonable people. Therefore, there is merit in putting aside fundamental and cherished convictions to establish basic democratic institutions. In short, Rawls offers a framework through which people attached to existing comprehensive doctrines can be persuaded to temporarily set them aside to engage in public reasoning to deal with politics that range from the light to the heavy. Still, as much as theory seeks to explicate the world, there is a sense in which it cannot help but create that world too, drawing attention to some things, downplaying others. Michael Sandel says that this is ‘unavoidable’ because theory ‘inhabits the world from the start’, adding that ‘practices and institutions are embodiments of theory’ (2005, 156). That said, he goes a step further: Sandel says that theory is more than just ‘regulative principles’; it conveys a moral anthropology. Even the most comprehensive democratic constitutions are partial; they cannot contain a complete set of ethical rules to guide persons on how to live a virtuous or ethically responsible life. Unsurprisingly then, this partiality invites thought on qualifying adequate discourse about the explication and construction of the world. A brief list includes Grice’s conversational implicatures, Habermas’ discourse ethics, Burke’s good reasons, Fishkin’s deliberative democracy, Brandom’s xiii

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scorekeeping, Johnstone’s rhetorical wedge, Stout’s expressive rationality, Tilly’s grudging consent, Toulmin’s good reasons approach and so on and so forth. For these dialectics to be meaningful they must keep score on action; it is why liberals have spent time seeking to qualify standards for adequate discourse. Ultimately, as Jeffrey Stout aptly points out, this is because ‘empty rhetoric is hardly an adequate basis for political community’ (2004, 4). The liberal view of the world entitles persons to use their voice as they see fit. Within reasonable limits, voices can express views irrespective of how empirically valid or logically sound those views happen to be. Indeed, freedom of expression cannot thrive when structural pressures constrain speech, even when these expressions are unkind. Even so, it is common for participants in democratic debates to be entirely reasonable and valid, yet still come to reasonable disagreement. If this holds for reasonable positions, when convictions and persuasion, methods and approaches, enter the fray, then disagreements can become irritating and upsetting, perhaps even raucous and infuriating. Reductive slogans and propaganda do not help. Furthermore, people can and do reproduce lazy and magical thinking. Questionable ideological beliefs sit alongside error while demonstrably false facts are presented as incontestable truths. Insults and smears are common too. And throughout, the insincere jest and muddy the waters as a lark. Democratic debate is costly, inefficient, repetitive, corruptible and arduous –​and yet absolutely necessary for human flourishing. In my view, liberalism offers the kind of ethical inheritance that virtually no other political philosophy can match. It also offers an ethical ambition that sets the highest standards of epistemic justification while nevertheless maintaining provisional status. Typically, liberals are attentive to what persons are trying to justify and whether the reasons for that course of action or belief are sufficient. This is a difficult test, one for which liberalism has been found wanting on occasion. But it is also one that the dogmatic are, eventually, unprepared to submit. That said, liberal social theory has much to gain by embracing methodologies that are anchored in historical materialism to determine the totality of the social world and the various forces that come to bear upon it. This approach is not entirely alien to liberalism. Rawls concludes A Theory of Justice with the invocative need to ‘regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view’ (1971, 587). Among other things, it is this the kind of conception of justice and totality which is required to scrutinize how capitalists’ intense exploitation of people and nature greatly harms all peoples’ dignity, power and prospects to live an otherwise free life, as it is only through such scrutiny that any equitable and humanely rational society is even imaginable. For these reasons, I do not yet believe that liberalism is flawed beyond repair. Rather, through synthesis it can become better attuned to 21st-​century situations. xiv

Preface

Finally, there exists a view that philosophical argumentation is unlikely to bring clarity to public issues. Nagel channels this despondency when writing that ‘moral judgement and moral theory certainly apply to public questions, but they are notably ineffective’; too often, when ‘powerful interests are involved it is very difficult to change anything by argument’ (2012, xii). While it is true that justice is in short supply even in highly democratized societies, there is a reasonable chance that this kind of polity can create it more readily than some other political forms encountered during modernity. Anyone disputing the impact of normative philosophy should consider how much Rawls’ A Theory of Justice remade the modern political landscape through heralding the rights revolution (see Ignatieff 2007). ‘Rights talk’ is the default institutional language for a significant portion of the world. And because rights can be leveraged, I am generally moved by what C. Wright Mills termed the ‘politics of exposure’ to help with that leveraging. I understand Mills to mean a practice of revealing the mechanisms by which undue power and domination reproduce themselves. The reason for this orientation is that unfair allocation mechanisms deeply affect individual and collective prospects for human flourishing. As this book sits at the intersection of political philosophy, political theory and political economy, I hope it can be of use to scholars from each of these disciplines. That said, I readily acknowledge that the specialists in each of these areas may wish for deeper coverage of their areas of expertise. Still, what is well known for one person may be newer to another, and so for this reason the book aims to prompt productive potential cross-​pollination among these groups of scholars. While analytical rigour and empirical specificity are important characteristics of good work in the humanities, arguably what is more important is productive conceptualization. In the case of this project, I aim to undertake an intervention around the luck egalitarianism literature to highlight not only the role of luck in forming social inequalities, but to suggest how broadening the agenda of redistributive justice programs can help tackle those kinds of social inequalities. To put it slightly differently, the book suggests that equality-​promoting approaches can strengthen the ‘liberal view of the world’, especially when it is informed by the method of historical materialism. This combination can power a critique of a capitalist political economy which allows luck to become institutionalized, thereby greatly exacerbating already massive social inequality. To advance these arguments, I draw upon the writings and inter-​mural debates of John Rawls, Bernard Williams and G.A. Cohen, three post-​war 20th-​century Anglo-​American philosophers who in different ways provided a critique of contemporary liberalism in their societies. My choice is not motivated by reasons of style or presumed exceptionalism. Rather, much like Stuart Hall (1988) drew upon Antonio Gramsci –​not as an ‘old prophet’ but instead as a reminder of what questions to ask –​so too do I turn to xv

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Rawls, Williams and Cohen as beacons for what paths of inquiry are useful, and what kinds of considerations to keep in mind when discussing the liberal treatment of social inequality. Additionally, I see it as an advantage that their best work was done before the neoliberal turn consolidated and that they were affected by the struggles over the form of the post-​war political economy which galvanized a wider movement to apply critical perspectives to moral and political problems in the 1960s. Having different terms of reference is especially helpful in our current conjuncture, given how elbow room is emerging for a new social compact in the US, UK and elsewhere. One question is whether this compact will lean in reactionary or revolutionary directions. Stimulation for the writing of this book has come from various sources, one of which was the experience of teaching several iterations of courses on modernity and ideology. This was to students at Simon Fraser University in the years following the 2008 Great Recession. One of the objectives was to survey longstanding debates in Western social science from the 18th century to the mid-​20th century, stopping just prior to the neoliberal turn. We sought to track issues of continuity and change in Marxism, conservatism and liberalism as they influence and are influenced by developments in Western societies, themselves embedded in a global history of imperialism, colonialism and revolution with a complex and contested domestic politics over the desirability or injustice of these processes as well as acute resistance from places under colonial occupation. Though it was rewarding to guide students on how they might leverage these ideas to conceptualize and then influence their surroundings, they were greatly troubled by what they accurately saw as the rapid diminishing of their own life chances. Between the inflow of wealth, which continues to greatly increase property prices and signal their prospects of social immobility, the nascent gig economy obliterating dignified work or the Conservative Party of Canada’s unrelenting march to dismantle social protections, they knew that social inequality would most certainly characterize the condition of their lives. The decade and a half since has only seen an acceleration of massive wealth concentration and the associated social, political and economic problems this concentration brings. As one commentator remarked, millennials are ‘the unluckiest generation’ (Van Dam 2020). No one should be subject to this intense stratification of life chances, whether in North America or elsewhere in the world. Scott Timcke Holetown, Barbados August 2022

xvi

1

Introduction In 19th-​century Britain, Scottish families used different commemorative practices to honour their dead. Commoners relied upon ordinary headstones while the wealthy used more expensive obelisks. The grave inscriptions reveal that those with obelisks lived longer lives; men averaging 65 and women 63 years. By contrast, the average male Glaswegian died at age 50 and the average woman at age 52 (Smith, Blane and Bartley 1994), a difference of 15 and 11 years respectively. To no great surprise, Glasgow’s poor bore the brunt of premature death during the industrial age. Even in death, class inequalities exist. In the early 21st century one would hope that the problem of premature death among the poor would be largely resolved. Yet, in contemporary London, the differential between Holland Park and Tottenham Green is 10.6 years for men and 11.4 years for women.1 And even when high-​r ise social housing were introduced to areas like North Kensington, unnecessary penny-​pinching when installing cladding and insulation led to 69 working-​class people burning to death in the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire (Symonds and De Simone 2017). Altogether 72 would lose their lives to the fire. Not only do these facts speak to the stubborn durability of unequal life courses in Western societies, but often the harrowing way life ends for those who suffer the most from the intensification of social inequality and the abjection that permits it. In the United Kingdom, 1% of the population hold about 15% of the wealth, and the top 10% own 40% of the national wealth (Office of National Statistics 2012). By contrast, 37% of British families are one pay-​cheque away from destitution (Collinson 2016). In the United States, 37.2 million people or 11.4% of Americans live in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau 2021), with many more financially insecure with 51% not even having $400 for an emergency (YouGov 2022). Nearly the same number have no assets (U.S. Federal Reserve 2022). In 2019, Jeff Bezos, then the

1

Data from https://​data.lon​don.gov.uk/​data​set/​ward-​profi​les-​and-​atlas. 1

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

wealthiest single American, was 21 times richer than Daniel Ludwig, his 1982 counterpart (Inequality.org 2022). A decade ago, ‘the wealthiest 1% of U.S. Households [had a] net worth that was 225 times greater than the median or typical household’s net worth in 2009. This is the highest ration on record’ (Allegretto 2011, 2). Presently the US 1% have a combined wealth of $45.86 trillion, whereas the bottom 90% –​that is, almost everyone else –​has a combined wealth of $43 trillion (U.S. Federal Reserve 2022). With US billionaires increasing their wealth by $2.1 trillion during the COVID-​19 pandemic (Collins 2021), this disparity is worsening even while media outlets speculate endlessly about the prospect of economic ‘recovery’ following the COVID-​19 pandemic. In another startling figure, since 1980 the 1%’s share of income has doubled, the 0.1%’s share has tripled and the 0.01%’s share has quadrupled. In the United States, nearly half of total assets are owned by 400 people. Making up 0.00025% of the US population, these 400 patricians own the equivalent of nearly 20% of US gross domestic product. To belong to the 1% a person must have a net worth near $4 million (Saez and Zucman 2016).2 Together, this group owns roughly 36% of all private wealth. For financial wealth, their share is over 40%. For stock, the share increases to 50%; for business equity, over 60% (Wolff 2014). But even within this cluster, there are significant differences between the 0.01% and the remaining 1%. The wealth threshold to be categorized as a member of the 0.01% is $111 million. The 6,000-​odd families that belong to this group average a net worth of $371 million (Saez and Zucman 2016). Elon Musk is so rich he could lose most of his wealth and still be a member of the global 0.0001% (Oxfam 2022). Beyond the US, ten men control more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth (Oxfam 2022). While it is true that the nine-​tenths of the planet’s richest 1% live in the Global North, such vast differences in wealth are not exclusively North American or European problems. Notwithstanding Brazil’s, South Africa’s and Nigeria’s growth, Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa remain the most unequal regions in the world. In East Asia, China’s inequality is on par with the US. In South-​East Asia nearly 100 billionaires have a combined wealth of $657 billion, the same as the bottom 40% of the country, or 555 million people. Only three of these billionaires are women (Oxfam India 2022). There is a history to this vast social inequality and its racial and gendered components. Between 1990 and 2010, global consumption grew by $10 trillion, yet 15% of that growth went to the global 1% (Edward and Summer

2

The term ‘1%’ emerged in the mid-​1980s from Democratic staffers working with the Congressional Budget Office when they sought to model tax changes. Occupy Wall Street subsequently used the term to give expression to a class subjectivity. 2

Introduction

2014). In effect this growth is not uniformly beneficial, arguably masking unsavoury underlying trends around class and global inequality. Even a modest redistribution of the dividends of that growth would have eradicated extreme poverty. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, William Robinson (2011) points to a small and distinct class of transnationally oriented elites profiting from globalized circuits of accumulation. With slight institutional modification, the harms of global capitalism could be dramatically restrained. A little bit of progressive taxation can go a long way to alleviating the most egregious suffering. Yet, the rich have a vested interest in stalling such efforts. This is because their wealth comes from the processes that extract surpluses from labour. As Figure 1.1 illustrates, this wealth is due to wide spread immiseration. This political vulnerability is not an accident. Since the 2008 Great Recession a growing number of socialist critics and reformers have argued that the 1% are, through their agents, systematically stripping the 99% of their political, legal and economic powers. Wealth inequality stresses political solidarity and social cohesion among citizens while the poor face a life of ongoing precariousness, a process Saskia Sassen (2010) has called the ‘savage sorting of winners and losers’. At the same time, the rich can generate differential political access and influence over subjectively desirable policies. Indeed, after comparing attitudes in the US population with enacted policy, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that ‘economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-​based interest groups

Figure 1.1: Wealth shares, United States, 1962–​2016 80.00 70.00 60.00 50.00 40.00 30.00 20.00 10.00 0.00

1962 1969 1983 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 Bottom 90%

Top 1%

Source: Compiled from data in Wolff (2017).

3

Top 5%

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

have little or no independent influence’ (2014, 564). This is one explanatory factor behind a long-​term ‘democratic recession’ (Diamond 2015). Similarly in the UK, austerity politics has decimated political solidarity. Socially, austerity tends to be nasty to immigrants, workers and minorities. It is contemptuous of the weak while lionizing the wealthy. The moral economy of this system predicates a person’s worth upon their ability to make money, to boast how they do not need to use the state. Supposedly this signals their inability to use their talents well while degrading those that need social protections as ambitionless free riders. Besides, it is said, the wealthy do good things with their money. Supposedly this investment and charity is reason to celebrate them. But this narrative is greatly mistaken. Granted, it is indisputable that the last half century has recorded unprecedented production of economic value and growth, with significant improvements in well-​being. The value is related to the changing nature of capitalist production, what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) has called ‘the Golden Age’ (also see Figure 1.2 and Figure 1.3). But the problem is not of absolute deprivation, or even relative deprivation. Indeed, we need to be cautious here. Widening inequality does not necessarily mean the decline of living standards (although that is happening in places). But what inequality does do is erode opportunities for labour while concentrating wealth with capitalists, thereby begetting political power. The problem of social inequality is who is in control of the economy, what mechanisms do they use to maintain that control and to what extent does economic power give them political power at the expense of democratic decision making. To be blunt, poverty and inequality are not due to a lack of productive capacities, but rather are inherent to the political economy of capitalism because the 1%’s interests are prioritized above all else regardless of what kind of political party forms the government. They are ‘lucky’ to have several institutions safeguard their advantageous social position. Some of the roots to the prevailing social inequalities I have described lie in the 1970s. A combination of anti-​union legislation, regressive taxation, liberalization of financial and banking laws and privatization of public assets led to the offshoring of the manufacturing base and stalled wages. Hereafter things stopped getting better for most working people. Adjusting for inflation, in 1978, a typical male US worker earned $48,000 a year and the average 1%’er earned $390,000. By 2010, the median wage had decreased to $33,000, while the 1% rose to $1,100,000. The increased cost of living and the need to purchase services previously provided by the state forced people to supplement income through debt or dual-​income families. Inflated house prices allowing extended mortgages and debt financing softened the blow, but such levies are no longer holding. By almost every measurable index, inequality is worsening and opportunities for the 99% are shrinking. 4

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Figure 1.2: The relationship between worker productivity and hourly compensation, 1948–​2020 300.00%

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Introduction

150.00%

Growth since 1948, net productivity per hour worked Growth since 1948, average compensation of production and non-supervisory workers

Note: Note the divergence between productivity and wages after the neoliberal turn. Source: Compiled from data collected by the Economic Policy Institute, State of Working America Data Library, 2022.

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Figure 1.3: Wages for top 1.0%, top 0.1% and bottom 90%, 1947–​2020 $45,00,000

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The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

$40,00,000

Introduction

One major cause of vast social inequality I have outlined is the dividends of economic growth slipping through a ‘democracy deficit’. The result is what Branko Milanović (2021) calls ‘three stubborn modern inequalities’. These are ‘the concentration of ownership of private assets (capital), creation of an elite rich in capital and labour incomes, and intergenerational transmission of advantage’. What unites these inequalities are differential structural uncertainty of life chances. The rich maintain their stations in life, while ordinary people face extreme precarity (Standing 2016). Indeed, profitability relies upon this precarity. All in all, it is clear that the current share of social value is the outcome of an ongoing historical struggle between capitalists and those they employ. The extreme harm produced by this struggle is completely inconsistent with liberal principles of justice. On the topic of justice, Warren Buffett has written several times of his belief that, in a market economy, the rich earn outsized rewards for their talents. In his 1977 essay, How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor, Buffett (2011) wrote that ‘a market economy creates some lopsided payoffs to participants. The right endowment can produce enormous piles of claim checks (stocks, bonds, and other forms of capital) on future national output’. For these reasons, he is a notable critic of dynastic wealth. Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, has similarly spoken about the role of luck in society writ large. ‘A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate –​these are the folks who reap the largest rewards’ (Bernanke 2013). To his mind, fairness mandates that the luckiest have ‘the greatest responsibility … to share their luck with others’ (Bernanke 2013). Put plainly, Buffett and Bernanke propose that the wealthy are hardly wealthy because of merit. If wealth was simply commensurate with rewarding deserving talent, while nevertheless unjust, it may be grudgingly tolerable to society at large. However, egregious moral harm occurs when the ‘right endowments’ of ‘merit’ are converted into political power. Not only do people not share the same social status, they also have a different moral status, meaning that there is a social licence to treat some persons differently in the ordinary course of politics. These are some of the reasons why impoverished people are labelled the undeserving poor. The problem is not that luck, contingency and external factors permeate the human condition. With maturity, people generally accept that a range of constitutions, endowments, andcapacity for efforts exist. They might even be willing to accept that luck, contingency and external factors shape how their beliefs about so many of the things they care about are historically situated and socially conditioned. But people generally reject the notion that these things in and of themselves give one person more moral standing than 7

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

another. To put it differently, the problem is not that Joe Root is a better cricketer than me and many others. The problem is Jonathan Oppenheimer gained his wealth through inheritance, with prior, present and future accumulation of that family fortune arising from the willing and eager participation in a polity that skews favourable, but unearned, circumstances for that accumulation; accumulation that came mostly come through taking advantage of the grotesque crime against humanity that was South African apartheid. The problem is that Oppenheimer’s wealth came at the expense of many and then has been used to maintain a capitalist political economy that aims to keep them immiserated and him in a privileged position of ruling the commanding heights. How is this even remotely fair? In this sense, inequality produces bad social outcomes like diminishing liberty in unjustified and unacceptable ways for most people, but especially the most vulnerable. In summary, social inequality exacerbates a general condition of alienation, thereby hindering genuine human flourishing. In this respect, social inequality is a legitimate and weighty grievance that can be appealed on political, economic and ethical grounds. And so, adequate remedy requires not just welfare redistribution but discontinuing domination, as well as the ideology that does the hard work of justifying that domination. So while Thomas Piketty’s (2014) concern with inheritance and structural exploitation via investment instruments is more radical than critics acknowledge, this kind of analysis can become more complete when founded on the contingency of inheritance and the institutional structure created to sustain its political potency.

Why luck? And why now? So far I have pointed to the critique of social inequality and capitalism while using Buffett and Bernanke to hint at the role of luck and inheritances in sustaining fortunes. Or denying fortunes to others. Now I turn to the matter of luck more directly, suggesting that it too is relevant for understanding how inequality is justified and maintained. There is a deep literature in moral philosophy on luck, and while I elaborate upon and intervene in that literature in this book, in the interim luck comprises the antecedent causal factors that are beyond a person’s circumstances to control which result in the further constitution of their attributes or situation. Depending on the circumstances, sometimes the role of contingency and chance –​luck –​is downplayed when it comes to social inequality and political domination. ‘It was your choice to pursue that chance’, someone might say, ‘why is it our problem if bad luck caused you ruin?’ But such responses seek to individuate and ‘responsibilitize’ a person by making judgements that discount the social reality in which choices are made and chances are appraised. This kind of individuation also discounts how that social reality was formed. It is a very uninspired 8

Introduction

sociological imagination precisely when there is a considerable need to comprehend how multiple reinforcing forces shape life chances. Such a task requires a sociological imagination open to new kinds of conceptualizations about the causes of social life. In this case it is ‘luck’. While concepts like intersectional privilege (Crenshaw 1991) and accumulated advantages and disadvantages (Merton 1988) have proved useful in the analysis of social inequality, conceptualizations of luck are also applicable to this task. Each kind of concept has its place. For example, intersectionality points to how the various dimensions of a person, like class and ascription, are rendered socially significant by systems, and these systems delimit their prospects for just treatment during an event. On prospects, Robert Merton wrote that ‘the ways in which initial comparative advantage of trained capacity, structural location, and available resources make for successive increments of advantage’ mean that ‘the gaps between the haves and the have-​nots’ typically widen (1988, 606). People who experience compounding disadvantage and inequity are not the problem, the means of these systems are the problem. Nevertheless, as Sara Ahmed observes, ‘when you expose a problem you pose a problem’ (2017, 37). In affiliation with these perspectives, one of the benefits of luck is its wide scope. To wit, luck alludes not only to the thrownness of experience and the natal facticity of a person, but also the entire cosmology that precedes a person which likewise shapes them and the cultural schema they receive. Beyond a person, while material history can explain much about relations within a society, all societies are formed through contingency too. What I mean is that societies could have been otherwise. Granted, capitalism tends to commodify almost all aspects of social life. But tendencies are not inevitabilities. Nor is it inevitable that capitalism is the be-​all and end-​all of highly advanced social organization. There are alternatives and other potentials. It is a matter of historical contingency that capitalism is the prevailing global political-​economic system. As I aim to show in this book, there is asymmetrical luck experienced by persons in different classes and their commensurate differential exposure to (un)foreseen hazards. Furthermore, typical individuated explanations for this exposure are coded and reified, meaning that there is a social distance between the life chances of ordinary persons and their comprehension of those life chances. Finally, these processes leave people susceptible to the institutional allocation of luck, both good and bad. I combine these elements to suggest that luck has institutional and ideological components that come to be naturalized. Altogether this creates conditions where attributions to ‘luck’ as a default lay explanation substitutes for and clouds an examination of the latent social structural forces that shape the differences in life chances between the 1% and the rest. To pick up upon one element of this dynamic, people often underestimate the extent to which they and the systems in which they live have been 9

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

contingently structured in such a fashion as to discourage a critical examination of the allocations of the opportunities to which Buffett and Bernanke point. For example, there has been much effort undertaken to normalize the rewards of merit, especially when hard work is involved. But this idea of ‘natural talents rising to the top’ almost exclusively focuses on outputs and achievements. However, positive beliefs about meritocracy often launder how wealth and privilege are critically involved as inputs or the arbiter of conditional access in the first place (see Sandel 2020). It well serves capitalists’ interests that there are ideas suggesting they have earned their wealth and privilege purely through their own labour. And finally, those with existing wealth and privilege can leverage these things to marginalize those whose talents make them extremely competitive for possible awards and achievements, but who also do not have the same resources at hand. By keeping awards, achievements and other outcomes in the orbit of the wealthy and powerful, Michael Sandel (2020) calls this rigged system ‘the tyranny of merit’. If the amelioration of social inequality requires a major redistribution of life chances, my argument in this book is that such redistribution ought to be based on a subtle appreciation of the factors that shape life chances. One of these factors is luck. And so, it is valuable to better understand, conceptually, how luck is produced and inherited. I argue that what often appears simply as brute luck (another term I will explain) has an institutional anchorage that to some degree can be amenable to collective human intervention to reform. Thus, any adequate discussion of luck necessarily commits one to consider the history of social relations and political structures. In this respect, the study of luck falls within the broad study of the ethical evaluation of political practices as it relates to the distribution of goods against metrics of egalitarianism. Determining what conditions make a system of allocation unfair, and whether these conditions are necessary features of that system, is one of the main occupations of liberal social theory. When using that phrase, I am referring to the mature version of liberalism that ascended to prominence in the Anglo-​American world in the wake of the Great Depression and Second World War. Although not exclusively developed by John Rawls, he is nevertheless the quintessential liberal philosopher of the 20th century. The initial concern of this variety of late 20th-​century to early 21st-​century liberal social thought was to respond to the emergence of large-​scale enterprises with concentrated ownership. As the historian Howard Zinn (2003) demonstrated in A People’s History of the United States, during the late 19th and early 20th century, mass commercial enterprises outgrew decentralized political governance, and so preserved some semblance of a democratic society required resolving this imbalance of power. For the most part, this came through concentrating political power to produce the clout 10

Introduction

required to effectively regulate big business. Effectively, ‘in the twentieth century’, Michael Sandel says, ‘liberalism made its peace with concentrated power’ (2005, 170). Luck is not neatly confined to matters of justice. It plays a crucial role in, and is centrally relevant to, debates in the philosophies of action, mind and knowledge. Because luck travels across these terrains there are various species, technical definitions, multiple meanings and different understandings due to various traditions of inquiry. Nevertheless, in my view, the political-​ economic analysis of luck should contrast causal imaginations and the actual probabilistic sequences that occur. The appreciation of causal relations between distinct items is key to understanding the intricacies of seemingly disconnected forces. This necessarily raises classical questions over the relationship between equality, justice and liberty. By the term ‘liberty’, I mean conditions where free will can be exercised, dignity is preserved, coercion is absent and alienation is not a general condition of life. This conception of liberty does not aim for nor expect to develop a specification of justice that will alleviate all intense dissatisfactions. One can live in liberty and still be dissatisfied, as one could also live in poverty and be happy. Accordingly, my concern is less with attitudes, temperaments and dispositions and more with the basic principles of fundamental justice. Drawing upon this approach, I argue that today’s capitalist liberal democracies fall far short of delivering a mode of living where all persons can flourish; arguably, capitalist liberal democracy retards more liberty than it delivers.

Against strict luck egalitarianism As a way of returning power and dignity to those whose bad brute luck is compounded by bad institutional luck, I aim to develop a practical way to conceptualize and demonstrate the unfairness of contemporary capitalist societies. I do this because too often debates about unfairness and inequality become squabbles about the accuracy of data and the suitability of econometric models but miss the point about ethics and exploitation, all of which results in a rhetorical redirect that distracts from reform, which itself too often aspires to do little more than rearrange suffering. Besides which, not all items of justice can be even captured by econometrics modelling. Irrespective of whether economic inequalities are caused by the genetic lottery of natural talents, the social lottery of opportunities to develop talents, or the market lottery where a person’s attributes become talents because they just happen to be in demand, are inherently unjust. Further, examining the role of market economies and institutional design in allocating life chances and rewards in contemporary society cannot be separated from a conception of what human flourishing happens to be and how it can be achieved. 11

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

Nevertheless, luck egalitarians have a reputation for giving considerable attention to detailing issues around partiality, auctions, acquired tastes and debates over the desirability of equalizing either welfare or resource allocations. Ultimately, the feeling one is left with is that the way these various ideas have been covered is unsatisfying. The reason is that these theories tend to give considerable attention to the actuarial, accounting and auditing elements of egalitarianism, oftentimes at the expense of the radical political commitments that drove this turn. I call this ‘strict luck egalitarianism’. What I mean is that Nagel, Dworkin and Cohen are preoccupied with the precision of redistribution at the expense of cultivating the character of a society of equals who broadly share a political project. In using the term strict luck egalitarianism, I roughly mean that luck egalitarians have somewhat neglected core egalitarian principles such as non-​ subordination and collective life. The preoccupation with assessing fortune and finding technical mechanisms to ameliorate bad luck has come at the expense of equality’s traditional goals and political character; attention to luck and its incumbent metaphysics comes at the expense of more concrete categorical and intersectional concerns of race, class and gender. In this way, egalitarianism does not seem sympathetic to traditional egalitarian political engagements regarding institutional oppression. Relational equality –​a longstanding concern, present in the arguments of R.H. Tawney (1931) and carried forward by Michael Walzer (1983) and David Miller (1999) –​is absent, and replaced by a highly individuated conception of equality. Harry Frankfurt (1987), Jonathan Wolff (1998) and Elizabeth Anderson (1999) are three philosophers who have become associated with the standard contemporary objection to egalitarianism. Focusing on the strict version (see Lamont and Favor 2017), wherein all people should have the same quotient of material goods and burdens, Frankfurt argues that economic inequality is not inherently unjust. Instead of seeking equal conditions or fiscal resources, he proposes that the target for proponents of justice is that everyone has enough. His objection rests on interpersonal comparisons, which he says lead to unhappiness through ‘divert[ing] a person’s attention away from endeavouring to discover –​within his experience of himself and of his life –​what he really cares about and what will actually satisfy him’ (Frankfurt 1987, 23). His argument strikes me as quaint: wholly naïve of the forces within a capitalist political economy wherein the concentration of wealth, to pick one item from a long list, causes great unhappiness for many. If the goal is to allow people to discover what they care about, surely it would be important to use egalitarian promoting mechanisms like unions and aggressive progressive taxation to give people the very means for that discovery? Wolff’s and Anderson’s respective objections are more nuanced, partly because they are specifically directed at strict luck egalitarians like Dworkin 12

Introduction

(2000) and Cohen (2011). In large and small ways, Wolff and Anderson held that the strict analytical concern for desert –​regardless of whether it emerged from contribution, effort or cost –​and personal responsibility undermined the political potency of the egalitarian ethos. Wolff for his part contended that egalitarians had conceded to the argumentative terrain set by libertarians. Strict luck egalitarians might counter by saying that if they were successful at the point where libertarians were strongest, then the subsidiary criticisms would be seen as the squabble they were and are. However, in the rush to accommodate responsibility, strict luck egalitarians retreated from the socialist tradition, at least according to Wolff. A similar compelling point Wolff makes is that regardless of the intellectual force of luck egalitarian arguments, as an ideal theory of justice real-​world implementation would prove difficult, especially so if luck egalitarians did not undertake more sustained thought about matters of public policy. Abstraction is simply not ideal for the egalitarian ethos. Strict luck egalitarians often claim that persons deserve to bear the full responsibility for all external costs of their choices. But this is hogwash for Anderson (1999), as that belief leads to unappealing outcomes by, for example, generating policy recommendations that are unwieldy, hyperbolic and even vindictive. Eliminating the differential effects of luck on the distribution of advantage would require micro-​managerial interventions that would diminish freedom and liberty, particularly around matters that are not chosen. As luck egalitarians are so recipient-​oriented, this intervention would segment persons according to a desert criterion, with some designated as deserving and others designated as simply vessels of fortune. The way that strict luck egalitarians perceive people as subjects to be audited could make people feel like they are being mistreated. In this respect, the actuarial focus on distributional fairness neglects that persons have a moral personality that directs their self-​realization efforts, with these same efforts relying upon their contingent features which they have embraced and made their own. As an alternative, Anderson proposes the agenda of ‘democratic equality’. Starting with the position that justice is ‘a matter of obligations’ not tethered to ‘the satisfaction of subjective preferences’, she wishes to move the discussion away from ‘innate endowments’ and reframe it as a matter of the basic quality of ‘relationships’ as it relates to ‘the distribution of divisible goods’ (1999, 336). On the face of it there is merit to her points. However, there are some indications that this early promise cannot be sustained. This is because Anderson seeks to separate the political from the economic. For example, she writes about how ‘injustices may be better remedied by changing social norms and the structure of public goods than by redistributing resources’ (1999, 336). For a theory of equality that stresses the role of politics, it is particularly unperceptive to the ways and means of politics in capitalist societies. Many of the social norms that can and do change in these kinds 13

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

of societies typically do not decisively threaten the main sources of power. Consider the summative evidence I presented earlier. Due to the power of capitalists, ‘average citizens and mass-​based interest groups have little or no independent influence’ (Gilens and Page 2014, 564). If Wolff had good reason to find that luck egalitarians lacked public policy experience, then there is good reason to believe that Anderson lacks the same. There are broader critiques of the distributive justice paradigm that come from Iris Marion Young and Nancy Frazer too. Notwithstanding her many fine contributions to political philosophy, Young’s critique of distribution ‘stands out as her deepest and most productive thought’, at least according to Rainer Forst (2007, 260). In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young pulls back from designing a theory of justice, which she understands as being a set of ideas that ‘stands independent of a given social context’ (1990, 4). Abstraction of this sort has little utility in actual situations where people seek to evaluate institutional life. This is because matters of justice are ‘not theorems to be demonstrated in a self-​enclosed system’, Young writes. ‘They are instead calls, pleas, claims upon some people by others’ (1990, 5). As people need to be moved by these pleas, it is desirable that ideas of justice retain ‘some substantive premises about social life’ (1990, 4) typically related to the situation in which those ideas are formed. It is from this vantage point that Young targets the broad paradigm of distributional justice, egalitarianism included. To her, the paradigm is overly invested in a calculability about the weight of ‘benefits and burdens’ (1990, 15) that people receive. Calculability of this sort imagines people as passive recipients of goods, thereby converting rights into goods. I would add that this calculability reinforces the ‘system of equivalence’ that capitalist commodity exchange promotes: the very first feature that Marx uses to introduce readers of Capital to the vast scope of alienation in modernity. In lacking details about appeals and the embodied enacting of people giving themselves their due, distributional theorists and strict egalitarians perpetuate mistaken ideas about how to create more just relations. They are so invested in end states that they do not look at dynamic processes, Young argues. But there is more. Young twists the knife when arguing that the distribution paradigm lacks a sense of history. What she means is that it fails to consider how the very things people make pleas about come into existence in the first place. Her rhetoric about the lack of attention to how production shapes political decisions is intended to wound. Liberal defenders of the distributional justice paradigm might respond by pointing out how Rawlsian theorizing repeatedly endorses constructivism, which they claim is concerned with history. See Rawls (1999, 303–​58) for the start of this theorizing.) So what is the alternative to distribution? Like Anderson, Young stresses oppression as it affects ‘decision making, division of labor, and culture’ (1990, 3). For Young, this change of frame beckons moral and 14

Introduction

political philosophers to engage with the gendered, racialized, sexual and other inequalities that are ‘the source of some of the most violent conflict and repression in the world today’ (Young 1990, 260). Nancy Fraser (2000) is also attentive to identity and inequality, although her position comes from a sociological analysis of political developments in neoliberalism wherein the politics of redistribution lost considerable sway, at least when compared to the post-​war decades. Following the near total defeat of labour politics in the last quarter of the 20th century, ‘struggles for the “recognition of difference” ’ (2000, 107) emerged as a means to make pleas to power about existing hierarchies. Mobilization of this sort was somewhat successful if only because power was more willing to engage in discrete bargaining rather than cater to egalitarian demands or broad-​based transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. Fraser, of course, did not suggest that identity politics drove inequality; rather, she held that neoliberalism had carved such great cleavages that this responsive technique was practically the only way to vocalize grievances. Put differently, in neoliberalism politics narrowed and class-​based appeals about redistribution had no purchase. As a counterpart, the kinds of social subordination Young addresses come from ascriptions where those with low status are ‘prevented from participating as a peer in social life’ (Fraser 2000, 113). In summary, strict luck egalitarianism has been cast as an untenable mode of distribution in the early part of the 21st century, rendering equality a technical philosophical exercise that hollows out political urgency. I would add that this literature tends not to confront the market square on. In skirting the issue, these theorists fail to address how the capitalist mode of production and its concurrent means of rule create and perpetuate, through ordinary operation, vast social, economic and political inequalities. Ultimately, strict luck egalitarianism cannot be well defended because the doctrine fails to treat all citizens as members of a collective enterprise who share in and are affected by the fortune of others; instead they are treated as the sole bearers of the consequences of their choices. This neglects the deeper political vision of equality that an excessively technical rendering of contingency and chance cannot provide. However, as I aim to show throughout this book, this is not the same as saying that matters of luck are unimportant for people who wish to promote equality and the egalitarian ethos in public policy. In that respect, luck egalitarians have touched upon something important, even if later articulations drift from the initial insight.

Qualified esteem for luck egalitarianism Arguably, there is a sociological reason for the turn to luck egalitarian literature by political theorists. I see this turn as part of the broader retreat from social commitments that was commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s. 15

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

This period saw the assertion of a technocratic public policy rife with a discourse about the deserving and undeserving poor (see Katz 2013). Likewise, in other branches of ethical theory the rise of virtue ethics could be interpreted as a focus on self-​conduct as opposed to social matters, given the apparent futility to even try to shift neoliberal reasoning. Furthermore, even though there was not much redeemable in Soviet communism, and the US authorities did not look too kindly on domestic left-​wing dissent during the Cold War, by virtue of its existence alone luck egalitarianism signalled that political-​economic questions were still open. However, with the collapse of the USSR in 1989, so triumphant views like ‘there is no alternative’ began to circulate within capitalist liberal democracies. With the proverbial ‘big questions’ concerning political economy supposedly settled, so neoliberal party platforms competed through promising superior administrative competency, best demonstrated by the delegation of market management to experts and their ‘scientifically grounded technical fixes’ (Hopkin 2020, 43). Within this context of capitalist realism, egalitarians in the West struggled to draw a sympathetic audience for purely relational arguments, let alone arguments that specified equal conditions. These notions were presumed to be politically untenable because of the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Hence, egalitarianism had to accommodate itself in the prevailing intellectual, political and economic climate of triumphant capitalism. The manoeuvre was to discuss equality of condition under the rubric of opportunity, luck and responsibility, thereby attempting to corner and co-​ opt portions of the reactionary argument about just deserts. Effectively luck egalitarianism sought to neutralize the effects of luck, good or bad, on life chances, suggesting that these conditions hampered fair opportunities. Politically, it was envisioned that governments would remove the undeserved disadvantages that hinder a person from fulfilling their projects while simultaneously providing an additional rationale for redistributive politics. While some criticisms of luck egalitarianism are weighty, like Wolff’s and Anderson’s, it is a mischaracterization that the literature fully neglects capitalism and subordination. Conversely, the core commitment of luck egalitarianism is to question the intersection of the state and the market (among other things) in a capitalist polity, insofar as that polity makes allocations and distinctions in morally arbitrary ways. The polity can also legitimate morally arbitrary natural differences in advantage without adequate justification, thereby making it politically relevant; or by, in effect, treating the lucky better than the unlucky. When this happen, those born to rich families can be granted full inheritances; their luck of birth gives them the clout to shape that polity to institutionalize their advantages. Moreover, if the state, the economy or a community makes bad luck systematically durable, it leads to undue subordination, castes and hierarchies. This thereby grants 16

Introduction

undue privilege and entitlements that are anathema to Rawls’ fair sharing of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. In summary, the goal of the luck egalitarian literature is to make persons aware of yet another kind of undue tacit political subordination through the disadvantages that result from natural bad luck. These are unquestionably morally arbitrary and hence lead to oppression, domination and exploitation. This understanding of equality is rooted in people being wilfully concerned for the welfare of others, so much so that they are willing to provide the means to meet these other’s needs. Equality is in part the desire to see the improvement of others and the diminishing of inequalities, irrespective of whether they are due or undue. It is the desire to see humans flourish. As I have presented it, social equality is a freely chosen responsibility provided by those who have the capability to provide for those who need provisions. Still, rather than making some outcomes and some claimants responsible for their bad outcomes, while attributing others to bad luck, critics claim that a better alternative is to end oppression, domination and exploitation (see Scheffler 2003). For this reason –​and although there are some parts of the text that do not hold up –​I think there is much to gain from looking at Marx’s (1999) thought on distributive justice as it is encapsulated in his Critique of the Gotha Program.

For equality-​promoting approaches As I have hinted at, the chief difficulties with strict egalitarianism more generally come from two main sources. The first is a matter of measurement. As Marx’s (1867) critique of the money form in Capital shows, problems of reification emerge when using an index to cover a wide variety of goods and services. Oftentimes the result both is reductive and conflates different things. Yet without suitable multiple metrics, it becomes difficult to determine the precise bundle of goods and services each person should receive. The second issue involves time frames. Even if everyone were to get the same bundle derived from sufficiently cogent criteria, what happens when inequalities emerge due to the differentials produced by savings, investment, exchange and labour? Certainly bundles could be periodically reset to counteract these new inequalities and new members could be incorporated into the reshuffling. But this policy course needs to consider the trenchant politics that would oppose re-​equalization. As I elaborate in Chapter 5, luck egalitarianism aims to somewhat appease the opposition to re-​equalization projects through accepting the need to audit contributions, efforts and costs. Here advocates conclude that distributive justice is fair when goods are distributed according to this system of measurement. But to reiterate, the difficulty with this approach is that it can be difficult to identify and discern contributions, efforts and 17

The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune

costs in a modern economy, let alone neatly discern the role of luck in each of these categories. There is a second problem, which is that most luck egalitarian theories have an ideal person in mind: able-​bodied working adults. Even granting the need to simplify real-​world situations to help undertake philosophical analysis, this narrowness is a discredit to the egalitarian ethos. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx adopts a position that avoids some of the negative features in the luck egalitarianism literature, like the excessive attention to matters of desert, while also keeping the more pressing political matters in mind. Temporarily setting aside his comments about the maturation of communism, rights and work, the key line from this text is ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ (Marx 1999). This axiom stresses the equality of personhood through people contributing what they can for the betterment of those who are most needy. This approach to equality is cognisant of the differences between people, such as their capacity to work or reason. An ‘individual endowment’ can allow one person to ‘labor for a longer time’ than another, as Marx wrote. Concurrently, each person is to receive goods, with those with higher situational needs taking priority. For example, ‘one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another’ (Marx 1999). By not specifying what people must contribute or receive according to the efforts or costs incurred, Marx provides a contextually dependent principle of distributive justice that combines unequal contribution and unequal distribution, two items that are often pointed to as realities that strict luck egalitarianism does not accommodate. However, when tied together this principle becomes ‘equality promoting’ over time as material conditions are altered to do justice to equal moral status. People receive what others can give, given the available resources and priorities. This transfer does not involve extensive auditing; there are no fine distinctions between the deserving and undeserving; and then there is no moral judgement about how a person became needy, just the aspiration to improve their condition so that they too can contribute to the social whole in time. One final benefit of Marx’s equality-​promoting approach is that it is practical. What I mean is that it can be used to guide social movements which mobilize around the aim of creating a classless society as well as public policy advocates, ombudsmen and civil servants who have a vested interest in designing social protections. While these groups might have different aspirations, this approach can give them a shared vocabulary to advance a circumstantial common interest. Indeed, this is one of the advantages of Marx’s thought: it recognizes the importance of liberal rights while also being fully aware of the limitations of those rights in capitalist societies. To put it somewhat differently, when so inclined policy advocates, ombudsmen and civil servants discover that they cannot adequately advance the egalitarian ethos due to the strictures of capitalism, they may well find common cause 18

Introduction

with movements working towards the decommodification of key aspects of human life, like health care, insurance, housing and transportation, to name a few areas. These kinds of alliances can thicken oppositional politics in capitalist societies to push for radical social change. Where there are different kinds of social relations, and new relations to infrastructure and institutions, there is a chance that these egalitarian transfers can fully bloom and otherwise become realized. To my mind, Marx’s equality-​promoting approach not only respects Wolff’s ‘egalitarian ethos’ but can productively sidestep issues of measuring bundles and time frames. In doing so, the approach focuses on what can be done to specific people in specific situations with the available capacities and capabilities. In this book, I call this the ‘capability-​priority principle’ and look to back it with argumentation drawn from the Anglo-​American literature on the ethics of distributive justice.

The agenda in this book As the earlier statistics I cited show, there is widespread disparity in the quality of life chances available to persons belonging to different classes. Granted, there are many other factors outside of a person’s socioeconomic position that can influence life chances, including such obvious ascriptive categories and relations like gender, race and ethnicity, in addition to the region or country of the world where one happens to be born. These factors in turn are often intertwined with others such as education and income, so that the lived experience of class often has a distinctively multidimensional and intersectional character. It can oftentimes be difficult to quantify, tally and represent this undue preferential treatment as raw econometrics data. Nor can econometric calculation capture the intricacies and latent reasons for the social practices that contribute to inequality. Accordingly, my focus in this book is directed at higher levels of abstraction dealing with the political economy of life chances as a feature of life in Western capitalist liberal democracies –​societies often promoted as the freest and the most equitable in the world. In the wake of growing unrest about economic disparities between the 1% and everyone else in Western societies, I believe that an assessment of the limits and possibilities of life chances in capitalist liberal democracies has assumed a renewed urgency. Equally urgent is a consideration of the political sleight of hand used to paper over the horrors and lawlessness of modern capitalism that perpetuate overwhelming and incontestably arbitrary suffering as capitalists seek to intensify the exploitation of virtually every sphere of human existence. Early 21st-​century capitalist liberal democracy contains many freedoms and has elevated living standards for many people. But it has also alienated people from quality prospects and genuine opportunities 19

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to improve their lives. The goal of making social life more democratic, just and equitable is one of the pressing political dilemmas of our time. I remain absolutely convinced that capitalism is an impediment to these goals. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the strengths and weaknesses of liberalism’s general orientation towards social inequality. In Chapter 2, I suggest that the practice of fundamental political justice should not be confined to questions involving redistribution or problems of income and resources. Rather, it requires that we attend to the power of capital as it has acceded to become the primary mechanism that structures social relations. Attending to this issue means we must have a redistribution of power through giving special attention to matters involving the accumulation of assets. Furthermore, against the background of the radical transformation wrought by modernity, industrializing economies and political centralization, Chapter 3 plots the key contours of late 20th-​and early 21st-​century liberal history and theory to identify the faults in its conceptual stance. I argue that liberalism requires supplementation with historical materialism, a theme I revisit in the last two chapters. Readers familiar with these debates can move on to middle portion of the book, which discusses issues related to brute luck and luck neutralization. Chapter 4 attends to Bernard Williams’ thought on how contingency has implications for an ethical evaluation of political practices. By showing that there are more sophisticated conceptions of luck, Chapter 5 rewrites luck egalitarianism to be less actuarial in its treatment of equality. In the final two chapters I show how the capitalist organization of infrastructure and institutions skews life chances to perpetuate the social inequality that places some people in the way of harm more often than others. Chapter 6 looks at how the structural causes of precarity are both naturalized and mystified. Chapter 7 addresses how a Marxist critique of political economy can contribute a greater methodological sensitivity to the critique of domination that liberalism lacks. All in all, I offer a defence of equality-​promoting approaches, both as a guide to conducting a detailed analysis of institutional allocations of life chances and as a politics robust enough to take on the sources of brute luck. I believe this critique may be useful for those interested in conceptualizing and critiquing the limits of a capitalist political economy of redistribution by inviting them to think in more radical terms.

20

2

The Egalitarian Turn in Liberalism It is near impossible to disentangle egalitarian concerns from the wide range of philosophical issues and political crises that span and shape the history of Western thought. Luck and contingencies are of this sort. Fate, for instance, was a common theme in ancient Greek and Roman life. These cultures appealed to the gods, sought prophecies and consulted oracles. Fortune was personified in the goddess Fortuna, who was capricious in her distribution thereof. (For a more detailed discussion of this topic refer to Nussbaum 2001 and Chapter 5.) In response to cosmic justice, Stoics and Epicureans sought to cultivate apatheia and ataraxia, attitudes that are indifference to Fortuna’s caprice. Chance appears in the Bible, with lots used to settle disputes, although as Proverbs 16:23 makes clear, the outcome is God’s will. Indeed, theologians generally tend to discourage lots, as it seeks to force God’s hand. Indeed, some branches of Christian thought believe that efforts to evade risk subvert God’s divine intention. In medieval Europe, fortune shifted from a fickle relationship with gods to a fickle relationship with nature. This is apparent in the iconography of the Rota Fortunae, The Wheel of Fortune; a water wheel motif that appears carved into medieval cathedrals or in 14th-​century illustrations like Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. While handmade, the waterwheel is still subject to nature’s temperamental forces to turn. These characteristics can be illustrated by the Carmina Burana, a collection of poems written between the 11th and 12th centuries, which opens with a description of Fortune that is ‘ever waxing and ever waning’. The temperamental nature of fortune is expressly found in the opening to the Fortune Plango Vulnera: I bemoan the wounds of Fortune with weeping eyes for the gifts she made she perversely takes away.

21

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Similarly, the temperamental character of nature is given a chapter in Machiavelli’s (1988) classic work in political philosophy, The Prince. Invoking the metaphor of a raging river, he proposes that fortune is a real occurrence. When in flood, the river can make the land ‘yield to its violence’. Despite this force, men can make provisions against the possibility of a flood by building canals and levees. This imposition on fortune, though, is not absolute, as provisions can often be negated by circumstances beyond human control. The raging river could be so strong as to overcome the levies erected to withstand it. For Machiavelli, if people take the right precautions, they could minimize their exposure to the whims of Fortune. But if not, the outcome speaks less to ill-​fortune and more to a person’s deficiencies of the requisite virtues. Machiavelli advises distinguishing between which (mis)fortunes are self-​ created while knowing that some (mis)fortunes are outside the scope of human influence. He recognized that while fortune can be ambivalent at times, it is nevertheless multifaceted, and its effects can be influenced by the actions of humans. His work is a prime example of a Renaissance thinker who recognized the ambivalence of fortune or luck. At risk of great generalization, medieval Europeans put considerable emphasis on the importance of fate, as living with powers and forces beyond a person’s control was a given, as Michael Oakeshott (2006) explains in his Lectures in the History of Political Thought. Soon this vein of Renaissance political thought was to be challenged by a growing desire to investigate, account for and potentially control the forces that shaped the world. Informed by Enlightenment approaches to evidence, and the promissory nature of inquiry, with great simplification 18th-​and 19th-​century political thought placed considerable stress on removing luck or chance distribution from analysis. Gamblers and mathematicians such as Pascal and Fermat were the first to explore the patterns behind luck and established modern probability theory. Through the development and use of probability and inference techniques, people improved the accuracy of prediction. This search for certainty soon spread through the financial sector, influencing insurance and business. A notable example is Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse becoming a market for maritime insurance. Proverbially, data were collected and techniques were developed to predict when Machiavelli’s river would break its banks. Alongside other major transformations in Europe, these changes contributed to Weber’s conclusion in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where the thought associated with ‘technical and economic conditions of machine production’ encompasses every person, ‘mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition’. For Weber, this rationalization and ‘care for external goods’ led to ‘an iron cage’ (Weber 2005, 123). From this vantage, as Thorstein Veblen (2007) 22

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observes, the belief in luck was considered an ‘archaic trait’, vestigial from premodern causality. Through this inheritance, some modern theories of justice have an uneasy relationship with luck. Being methodically and naturalistically oriented, one intuition is that if an account of justice allows luck to play a key role, then that conception could be rejected. This is because luck largely belongs to the collection of actions and forces that lie outside the realm of influence by human activity, and thus out of the reach of institutional intervention. But, similarly, implicit to any theory of justice is a sense of luck, since it demarcates what is in the orbit of human affairs and what can be influenced in its distribution. Emerging from the development of institutional governance, modern theories of justice are oriented towards the evaluation of a person’s actions and seek to address the underlying causes of misfortune and injustice. Sometimes these kinds of harms are contingent, as Machiavelli pointed out. Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism is perhaps the preeminent effort to address unknown contingencies, both morally and politically. Its concise expression can be found in his essay On the Supposed Right to Lie. Kant asks one to consider the case of a murderer pursuing an intended victim. Suppose you know where the intended victim is hiding, and the murderer asks as to their whereabouts. The question is, would you provide that information? Or would you lie? Kant says you should not. His answer rests on the possibility that the intended victim might have escaped his hiding place without your knowledge and that if you tell the murderer he is not there, the murderer could run into his target when moving on. But this answer appears to double down on a ridiculous position, reducing a serious issue into a case of moral slapstick when one imagines the two colliding. Thus, the Kantian moral system has been criticized for being practically untenable. However, this interpretation misses the point. Consider the series of things that need to occur for these two people to run into one another: wrong identifications, opportunities missed and grabbed, a turn this way or that. The outcome is seemingly a question of luck. The point is that Kant highlighted contingency and the limitations of our control over the natural world. Kant’s goal was to deflate the hubris associated with the belief that we have absolute power over the consequences of our actions. While we do have some control over our actions and the consequences thereof, nevertheless, contingency plays a large role in human affairs. This means that our powers are significantly less than our posturing and bluster might otherwise indicate. Kant’s example speaks to the grand scope of contingency, both in determining situations and outcomes and in the realization that we must be frank about our epistemological limits. For this reason, because ends are not self-​guaranteeing, Kant argued that being free and autonomous required one to choose the constants of life; to select between different means and purposes. By this he means the selection of universal binding resolutions that 23

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reduce harm. This argument establishes the foundation for most political arguments that give priority to right over ‘the good’, whether they are liberal, procedural or constitutional. The general claim is that one can know rights, but one cannot know goods; this means that political systems must be based on what is known or highly probable rather than what is arbitrary or less probable. Kant’s point holds, despite being in a position where, to use John Searle’s (2007) turn of phrase, we have established ‘the basic facts of the universe’. Although we do not always know what might result from our actions, we do have some degree of knowledge about the likelihood of certain outcomes. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the sheer increase in scientific knowledge about the world and the near unprecedented cosmological turn of revolutionary proportions, I believe it is necessary to retain Kant’s epistemic humility. I bring this attitude to bear on the conceptualization of social inequality in the coming pages.

The problem of social inequality Although there are good arguments and evidence that human prehistory was full of experimentation with political forms, there is also evidence that the first farming communities were egalitarian in character, and that egalitarian character could be found in many early cities (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Due to this experimentation, there have been societies where dominance and exclusion routinely feature, with the corresponding limitation and withholding of privileges, offices or statuses and the granting of these same items to others. Where undue preferential treatment has been a feature of most human societies, it can often be difficult to tally, reduce and represent these forces as raw econometrics data. Nor can econometrics capture the intricacies and latent reasons of the social practices that contribute to inequality. Newer theories and methods, often originating in the sociologies of race, gender and sexuality, have greatly expanded the study of social credence around belief and privilege, and how the micro-​aspects of discriminatory interpersonal relations are licensed by institutional logics, as well as accumulated advantage and disadvantage. sophisticated econometrics capture the intricacies and latent reasons of the social practices that contribute to inequality. It would therefore be foolish to claim that capitalism is the only social system that causes inequality. Still, it would be even more foolish to claim that capitalism is not deeply embedded in creating and exacerbating various kinds of inequality. Early modern writers as diverse as John Locke (2003) in his Two Treatises of Government and Karl Marx (1987) in Capital attribute inequality to the social dominance of one force such that it eclipses other forces’ abilities to function as they might otherwise; a ‘domination disrupts nature’ thesis. Both Locke 24

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and Marx identify money as one such dominating force. This dominance applies not only to money being the end of a transaction, but also to the dominance of the means of transaction, with corresponding ramifications for the items being transacted (for more details see Cohen 1995, 165–​94). For example, Locke notes how the accumulation of wealth allows people to store more than they require, leaving relative deprivation in times of scarcity. Contrary to Locke, Marx notes how ownership for the purpose of wealth creation seeks a drive for efficiencies at the expense of persons. Initially, this drive seeks to make embodied labour (i.e. the labour time spent making a commodity) the same as counterfactual labour (i.e. the labour time necessary to make a commodity). In doing so, this drive fails to treat persons as persons, but rather treats them more instrumentally as organic machines. Moreover, when more workplace efficiencies are demanded, machines come to replace persons. Mechanization leaves people unemployed, underpaid or in a labour market which must account for the intervention of the machine. If enough mechanized efficiencies are introduced and workers lack incomes, they can longer buy the goods being produced. The result is a crisis of effective demand that jeopardizes the collective well-​being. Central to these processes is that value, as represented by money, detrimentally eclipses other values. Marx was particularly attentive to this feature. He emphasized how commodity fetishism, with its apparent ability to render all items comparable, fuels inequality. It is not the process of exchange that renders things equal. Rather, it is the reduction in exchange to an abstract common unit: labour in Marx’s case. This supposed one-​dimensionality of value posits that all things can be assessed by a total of said units, such that their reasons for existence must be justified accordingly. In short, this is a critique of exchange logic, the fallacy that all items are commensurable. While Locke and Marx had severe criticisms of how accumulation put undue stress on social relationships, in their different ways they both hoped that accumulation would prefigure the conditions for more just societies, these being either commonwealth or communism. In response to the domination of money and power, early liberals sought to establish the rights of human beings such that their labour and lives could be respected, and that arbitrary power could not intercede in this area. They wanted to establish societies that protected the attributes of persons, and that would negate the class system of the agrarian and feudal society as well as the political centralization occurring in European state building. Later Marx, and many of his followers, argued alternatively that rights and representation were insufficient to achieve the task of political emancipation. Instead, they sought to neutralize class altogether by dissolving property rights and restructuring the social relationship to the means of production. The orthodox Marxist tradition as developed in the Soviet Union, and Maoism as developed in China, sought to accomplish this through the bureaucratic apparatus set 25

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up by vanguard communist parties. More recent democratic socialists have modified their approach and, instead, now call for the democratization of the means of economic production (e.g. Sunkara 2019; Aronoff, Kazin and Dreier 2020). Without doing too much of a disservice to the various positions on the matter, democratic socialism requires that a group’s relationship to the means of production should not determine their status as persons, class positions should not curtail access to economic opportunities, upward economic mobility should be possible and progressive taxation regimes should invest in social services. There are important differences between these traditions of thought, but they share a desire to move from a society where arbitrary class distinctions and life courses are determined by birth, station and circumstance, to a society where these things are not the case. Adjacent to the liberal democratic and the democratic socialist critiques of inequality outlined earlier, one can plot an anarchist position as represented by Jean-​Jacques Rousseau. His critique of inequality took the form that it was ‘contrary to the law of nature … that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities’ (Rousseau 1984, 137). Rousseau combined, as Keith Harts (2013) puts it, the critique of the unequal societies with a revolutionary politics aiming for democratic emancipation. The critique stands on the premise that inequality is wrong because it deprives others of an imagined natural ability to reproduce and sustain their lives in the manner of their choosing. In other words, inequality undercuts autonomy. It should be noted that Rousseau’s critique is not based on what we might now call the supposed unfairness of contingent attributes of a person and their natural capacities. Rather, it hinges on the hoarding of virtues and values, practices and positions, authority and allocation by some to the detriment of others. Hence, some persons cannot live as well as they potentially could. As such, inequality harms human flourishing and liberty, both individual and collective. This argument was based upon an unconventional interpretation of the formation of civil order itself. Contrary to social contract theorists, Rousseau proposed that civil order and the state cement inequalities, as opposed to providing the means to rectify them. Indeed, he argued that the development of pastoralism had two social ramifications. The first was the acceptance of the domination and cultivation of nature, which once done successfully, allows persons to subjugate nature into a hierarchy. This template is repeated elsewhere where possible. The second was the development of land rights. These combine to form property rights. Rousseau contends that the invention of private property is the origin of social inequality, private property here being understood as holding exclusive rights of use against the world. The critique has two horns. The first horn is based upon the opportunity costs that come from latent utility in denying an item’s use by others; in other words, not maximizing an item’s utility leads 26

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to deprivation. The second horn turns on how possession creates a reason for exchanging items. This becomes solidified by contract to the detriment of those without the means to reproduce themselves autonomously. As such, the emerging consensus and social contract that rested on this social formation inherited an acceptance of inequality based upon the authority to exclude. Additionally, Rousseau claims that the social contract, at least at the time of his era and location, existed purely to perpetuate property rights. As the social contract favoured the rich, for Rousseau the only recourse was to dissolve the state to try to establish legitimacy anew. Inequality, after all, was symptomatic of human alienation. The remedy was to rid society of the division of labour and return to a state of grace with nature; what Rousseau preferred and fetishized as the ‘nascent society’, a settlement pattern that emphasized direct contact with nature though hunter-​gathering: a form of self-​sufficient tactile involvement with nature that would remedy the alienation brought by civil life. Following Rousseau, many have attempted to catalogue and account for the mechanisms that organize this type of social contract. The list ranges from believing that contracts mystify social relations, impose hegemony, indoctrinate and interpolate persons into ideological formations, coerce persons, are tyrannical, protect undue inheritance and so on. It is unnecessary to detail the precise contents of these mechanisms; rather, it is important to note that each is based upon a critique of the contract itself. From this vantage, contracts are always made between parties of unequal positions and different roles. For this reason, contracts are presumed to perpetuate human’s alienation from nature because they are judicial rather than customary. Next I look at how property rights uphold various forms of alienation.

How private property regimes alienate Given low levels of democratization in Europe for the first half of modernity, as well as the experience of being subject to the whims and wishes of many autocrats, one must grant the long memories of theorists like Friedrich Hayek their due. With a constant worry about despotism –​perhaps too much –​Hayek vehemently argued that ‘there can be no freedom of press if the instruments of printing are under government control, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly’ (1978, 149). Through projects like installing the supremacy rule of law and other mechanisms like property rights to ward off expropriation and dispossession, so the market (while not the embodiment of liberty) was seen as an entity to secure the liberty of an ascending bourgeois class in a changing political order that did not necessarily have their interests in mind. Still, Hayek plainly said that the market is not liberty, writing that ‘freedom and wealth are both good 27

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things [but] they remain different’ (1960, 17–​18). But Hayek could not see the double edge of contracts. Certainly, they could be used to prevent dispossession, but they certainly facilitated it too. Proposing that property is a limited right is to say that it is an enforceable claim. That means there are limits to what can be enforced, and enforcement must be balanced with other rights. In contemporary societies this duty falls to the state. For this reason, property requires justification. For Jeremy Waldron, the issue is whether justification is even possible. His test is to judge the quality of the rights-​based arguments favouring private property. To his mind, there are two broad approaches, the Lockean and the Hegelian. Lockean arguments claim that a person who uses his or her labour to legitimately modify an item can claim it as property. (Marxists retort that this argument is a fig leaf for colonial activity and dispossession.) Hegelian arguments claim that property ownership helps a person’s ethical development, as they learn to value items, so for this reason it is important to develop a property-​owning democracy. Jeremy Waldron provides a tidy summary, noting how ‘both lines of argument hold that individuals have an interest in owning things which is important enough to command respect and to constrain political action’ (1988, 3). But there are good objections to both arguments. First, the Lockean position is simply a historical fiction, so we should not be satisfied with property being justified on these grounds. As for the Hegelian argument, while property ownership might assist in the development of certain virtues, it seems apparent that even people without property can develop the same virtues of care and consideration. Property then cannot be a necessary feature of a person’s ethical development. Lastly, the desire to accumulate possessions can clearly lead to immoral conduct in certain instances, so it does not follow that the desire to accumulate wealth always induces positive ethical development. If one were to put stock in property being a necessary component of ethical development, then it would appear as if the Hegelian approach would provide additional grounds for distributive justice treating this as another kind of fair constraint on the rights of owners. Recognizing that the ‘institution of property’ typically serves the expectations of the ‘dominant classes in society’, but also that new classes can attain dominance and ‘hence the meaning’ to the institution, C.B. Macpherson points to a third kind of justification, that being the right to reproduce the conditions for the means of life (1978, 1). So understood, it is not so much an investment in particular objections to the exclusion of others per se, but rather the attempt to ensure sufficiency. This is likely a more adequate understanding of property and life if ensuring and protecting life is central to liberal philosophy. If we discard the narrow Lockean and the Hegelian understandings of property, then this may satisfy some critics of liberalism who charge the philosophy with perpetuating a regime of 28

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possessive individualism that exploits people by excluding time from their lives, helps concentrate capital and sets power relations between classes. Now property is only useful to the extent that it can safeguard sufficiency for all and allow persons to develop themselves as they wish. In Macpherson’s view, if we endorse liberalism’s commitments then the present understanding of property rights needs to be expanded, for how else could one develop an adequate liberal philosophy which aims to respond to actual lived conditions by not taking into consideration a property regime’s mechanics? Effectively, Macpherson proposes that certain kinds of property regimes are incompatible with the liberal order. Therefore, in making modifications, he thinks that the institution can gain new meanings that orbit a new principle: ‘The right not to be excluded by others may provisionally be stated as the individual right to equal access to the means of labour and/​or the means of life’ (Macpherson 1978, 201). This modification focuses on the ability of persons to claim rights to use items for their survival. It is thus a matter of being able to advance a person’s projects freely and autonomously. Conversely, the denial of some items for specific periods and uses may limit a person’s liberty insofar as the item is no longer available to safeguard their life. The implication is clear: arguments which appeal to human rights to preserve an aggressive private property regime are really efforts to justify the deep inequalities found in advanced capitalist societies. There is much value in Macpherson’s goal to rehabilitate liberal rights. Roughly, his rehabilitation is the right for life to reproduce the conditions for the means of life. In this respect, Macpherson draws attention to a practical point about liberty: it seeks to empower persons to be involved in and set the terms for the decisions that affect their lives. Lastly, those familiar with Macpherson’s work will note how his reformation puts liberalism and capitalism in conflict, suggesting that capitalism perpetuates inequality and deprives people of their liberty. In this respect, addressing social inequality requires surfacing class conflict and struggle over the distribution of the social surplus.

Issues of basic-​fundamental justice To speak of luck, liberty and equality necessarily requires consideration of the issue of justice, and this brings me to John Rawls. Following his turn away from religion after the Second World War, Rawls’ scholarship attended to outlining ethical decision procedures and rules (e.g. 1951). Initially, his focus detailed the practice of judgement, specifically the criteria of satisfactory judicial decision making. He concluded that one characteristic of a good judgement is that the decision comes before the rule. Rawls calls this the burden of reasons. This means simply that good judges weigh reasons for actions as opposed to applying rules out of hand. From this base, like many 29

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other political philosophers of his time, Rawls attended to the entangled problems of war, social coherence, political stability and justice in the post-​ war period. Generally, one can classify Rawls’ early work, as exemplified in A Theory of Justice, as a contact theory, albeit with Kantian roots rather than utilitarian ones. Rawls writes that fundamental political justice concerns two issues: ‘constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice’ (Rawls 1997, 767). Whereas constitutional essentials concern rights, institutions and the rule of law, basic justice is about the organization of the political economy. Essentially, Rawls considers justice to reside more profoundly in the ideals around which a society is organized. It is well known that Kantian moral theory has it that a person must set and obey self-​governing rules, and that their actions must be purposeful, deliberate and reasoned. In essence, free subjects give themselves principles of action. Concretely, this amounts to consistent moral principles emanating from the self. To fit within these established parameters, liberalism is tied to a compatibilist conception of free will and to exposing undue constraint. A moral sceptic might suggest that this argument presumes that persons can generate the rules that they do because if they could not, then they would be otherwise; that is, we generate rules we can follow, because if we could not, we would not. The moral sceptic could claim that this is not a moral theory but simply a convenient coincidence with the added error being the mistaken belief that individuals can spontaneously create rules. The sceptic might add that the notion of self-​generating rules is intellectually impoverished. My reply is that the moral sceptic neglects that moral theory is meant to have a kind of convenience, it just not the kind in which the sceptic is interested. It is convenient insofar as it draws attention to the kinds of actions which require deeper deliberation: it is purposefully selective of which kinds of conduct are ethically charged and which kinds are not. Commitment to freedom often involves endorsing a person’s inherent dignity, inviolability and inalienable rights, treating them as if, to use Rawls’ term, they possess a ‘reasonable moral psychology’ (1999, 445). These intuitions provide Rawls’ first principle of justice: ‘Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberty compatible with a similar system for all’ (Rawls 1999, 154). These rights are self-​generating and can be demonstrated by respecting another person’s moral power and standing. This involves recognizing that they have the capacity for a sense of justice, a capacity for a conception of the good, autonomy and the freedom of belief and conscience, and that they are viable rhetorical others; that is, they can give and take reasons. Recognizing these attributes compels one to acknowledge that persons can reasonably pursue a complete life of their own choosing irrespective of race, class, gender or sexual orientation. Despite being one of the primary constructors of the conception, subsequently Rawls came to realize the limitations of a procedural approach. 30

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His primary objection was that the procedural approach obfuscates the key distinction between a justification of a practice and the justification of an action. This distinction is important because it leads to vastly different conceptions of authority, and thus in turn has implications for various appeals to what is just. In part it is related to the letter and spirit of the law, and to volition and compulsion. This orientation has seen Rawls compared to Habermas. But whereas Habermas dealt with the ethics of communicative action and proposed constitutionalism to address conflict by establishing checks on the abuse of power, Rawls, on the contrary, quite correctly points out that these are not enough to secure justice. Justice is more than ideal procedural execution. As an alternative, Rawls proposed an attitudinal approach that emphasized reasonableness. Further, given that total agreement is impossible, Rawls is correct to make allowance for modus vivendi on comprehensive issues, albeit still seeking to construct a pragmatic overlapping consensus so that peaceful social life is feasible. He offers a soft version of the rational accord of persons based on an extremely broad metaphysical conception of the person as a reasoning agent. Rawls certainly leans upon Kant’s conception of the person as a reasoning agent. To support his concept of reasonableness, Rawls introduces an anthropology of ideal judges. One can find the expanded criteria in his essay Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics, but for present purposes it is sufficient to say that ideal judges have a set of capabilities and virtues that allow them make decisions in circumstances where a moral decision is required. However, given differences in capabilities, Rawls puts more weight on virtues because they can be adopted and cultivated. He is not alone. Whether in Bertrand Russell’s A Liberal Decalogue, or Nussbaum’s (2010) writings on the value of the humanities in Not for Profit, liberals seek to cultivate the reasoning mind. Indeed, Rawls calls reasonableness an intellectual virtue of impartiality and a ‘habit of the mind’ (1999, 2). It seems to me that Rawls’ priority of the person is simpler, subject-​centric and easier to justify. Rawls contends that his ideal judges are reasonable and that reasonability ‘replaces the search for moral truth interpreted as fixed by a prior and independent order of objects and relations, whether natural or divine, an order apart and distinct from how we conceive of ourselves’ (Rawls 1999, 306). His basic list to identify reasonableness is that reasonableness (1) is different from rationality; (2) presupposes and subordinates the rational; (3) is an element of social cooperation, while acknowledging personal projects; (4) is an intellectual virtue; and (5) explicates considered judgements. His thought ultimately comes to give considerable weight to reasonableness. This is made most explicit in Rawls’ Dewey Lectures on Justice and Kant, where he says that the metric to judge the effectiveness of fundamental justice ought to be reasonable agreement as opposed to moral truth. For instance, he says that ‘conditions for justifying a conception of justice hold only when a 31

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basis is established for political reasoning and understanding within a public culture’ (Rawls 1999, 306). Still, little of this gets around the problems of intersubjective agreement. If one were to avoid this, it seems that reasons and beliefs must be justified and true. This returns reason to an epistemological problem. Effectively, Rawls presents reasonableness as a disposition where a person can engage in a fair means of cooperation by giving due consideration to the issue on merit. This is not to say that reasonable political conceptions will always lead to the same conclusions. Rather, they are a practical means to determine which items can qualify for legitimate debate. Thus, the outcome is not necessarily true or correct, but rather legitimate according to methods of reasonable criteria and process. All this is important because in A Theory of Justice, Rawls uses reasonableness as the parameters by which a person might act in the original position and then generate a liberal conception of substantive justice. For this reason, Rawls describes his position as ‘constructive’; not in the methodological sense, but meaning that it is ‘helpful to settle disputes’. Rawls was clear that this could not be extended to moral reconciliation of value conflicts. The search for fundamental justice does not preclude disagreement. However, Rawls qualifies that this disagreement must be based on a valid differential assessment of the ‘burden of reasons’. Indeed, it would be unreasonable not to recognize irreconcilable reasonable disagreements. However, these reasons must not be inconsistent with being reasonable in the first place. And so prejudice and bias, irrationality and stupidity, and allegiances to different visions of the world which admit no new information are not sources for reasonable disagreement. I want to emphasize the incomplete nature of evidence and the different weighting of evidence in lieu of vague and incomplete evidence, and that it is unknown what percentage of the total picture a person might have. Here fallibilism is a reasonable habit of mind, with goals that are tentative and revisable. But while judgement can be mistaken or false, I take for granted that there are things that can be true, and that humans can directly and indirectly perceive and detect that which is true. To those who might object, we can point out that there is a difference between what is true and what passes for being true, and that one can infer things from these true propositions. In other words, there is a chain of legitimate inferences that present evidence of a certain kind for actions and circumstances. There is merit in using the reasonable self as one of the main subjects of political theory. This endorsement affirms ordinary life, giving due attention to self-​interpretation of the communal acts of language and dialogue. This supposes that individuals live together and talk together. To this extent, I side with a historically situated understanding of the self, a self that comes to understand and respond to unique social settings. This is to recognize 32

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that individuals are subject to the pull of many forces, although this does not presuppose that any one of these pulls overdetermines the others in the ongoing process of constitution. The social self is a site of dynamic struggle and imagination.

Repairing markets In the wake of the Great Depression, liberal economists acknowledged that markets require intervention to repair them and to subordinate them to the public interest in liberty. Along these lines, John Maynard Keynes produced the emblematic synthesis of liberalism and social democracy, a marriage which promised a solution to economic problems. ‘We are suffering just now’, he wrote in 1930, ‘from a bad attack of economic pessimism’. This was because economists had ‘a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us’ (Keynes 1963, 358). The technical solutions existed; the question of prosperity was a matter of pace. Even so, this trajectory could be disrupted by ‘wars and civil dissension’, both by-​products of radical uncertainty, a condition that Keynes spent so much of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money addressing. Addressing these questions requires consideration of issues like corruption, the capture of state politics, factionalism and the unequal nature of capitalism. Still, there is considerable disagreement among liberals about how strategically to achieve their desired situation. Some give priority to the idea of increasing goods, while others advocate the importance of diminishing harms. There is also disagreement over whether items such as political influence, statuses, offices and positions should be incorporated into a consideration of equality, or whether they should be treated separately by other moral principles. However, if offices and titles are to be dealt with according to other moral principles, what then is the interface between equality and these principles, and indeed would some of these principles distract from equality in some unacceptable manner? Once these issues have been resolved, there is the practical question about how to implement these goals and advance equality. Aware that the private sector is inherently rent-​seeking, liberals grant that the inequality and social misery produced by markets ought to be fixed. But there is disagreement over what kind of corrective interventions work under what conditions, what the are priorities and then what redress is sufficient (see Sen 1980; Anderson 1999). Indeed, some liberals argue that certain kinds of egalitarian intervention may harm liberty in unacceptable ways. Egalitarian sceptics might concede that social inequality is a burden to be avoided or alleviated where possible. Still, they might counter with the claim that despite longstanding disparities and differentials in such things as income, power or status, society has yet to collapse. Yet, even if disparity and differentials did 33

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not threaten the stability of a society –​and they do –​there is a powerful impulse in Western social thought that focuses on the importance of non-​ subordination. However, and this is the important point, liberals like Keynes tend to confine themselves to offering critiques of market societies, not to offering critiques of capitalism as such. The result of this conceptualization limits the understanding of harm caused by capitalist markets as well as the kinds of interventions required to address the first causes of those harms. Instead, the luck egalitarianism I advanced in Chapter 1 and revisit from Chapter 4 onwards seeks to show that when the arbitrariness of fortune, to use Rawls’ term, is institutionalized and subject to forces like commodity fetishism, it becomes a form of domination that cannot be addressed by repairing markets by, for example, pricing in externalities. To put it plainly, one must go beyond the critique of markets to have a fuller sense of how markets in capitalism and private property regimes alienate people from one another and in turn naturalize the sense that hierarchies born from free labour are fair and appropriate.

The arbitrariness of fortune Rawls presumes that persons are equal in their moral powers and are capable of reason. So, when constructing societies, such persons seek structures and relations that incorporate luck-​neutralizing features. Rawls thus permits qualified inequalities, but nevertheless maintains priority for the worst off. His theory is difficult to categorize as pure egalitarianism. In marrying moral equality with limited economic inequality, some writers, like Nagel (2012), believe that Rawls’ theory is the paradigm of equality, while others like Norman Daniels (1975) believe that Rawls condones inequalities. In fairness, it is a bit of both. Rawls’ relative egalitarianism is directed at social primary goods because they are the means to achieve the selected goods the person decides to pursue. In Rawls’ schema, social primary goods are listed as liberty, opportunity and the powers of offices, income and wealth. These things require a solution for distribution because these are the things that any reasonable person would want, irrespective of their life course (Rawls 1971, 62). The difference principle decides the form of sufficiency and content of income, wealth and equality of opportunity. By drawing attention to equality as a political commitment, Rawls set in motion a broad discussion about the categorical and durable inequalities that people face daily, and the extent to which any of these inequalities are fair or deserved. In support of the radical appeal to unfulfilled desert, Rawls notes that ‘there is no more reason to permit the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune’ (Rawls 1999, 64). Elsewhere he writes that ‘those who have been favoured by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those 34

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who have lost out’ (Rawls 1999, 87). These observations about contingency provide the rationale for luck egalitarianism, a political theory that tries to synthesize desert and equality. Sentiments like these have prompted considerable debate over whether egalitarian principles are suitable and amenable to the arguments of modern liberalism and the degree to which they can be incorporated thereunto salva veritate. Indeed, there has been a notable ‘egalitarian turn’ in liberal theory towards identifying inequalities that are morally arbitrary, and hence undeserved by individuals, and that diminish their liberty unfairly or bloat them for the beneficiaries of inequality. I have in mind inequalities that result from contingency rather than those that arise because of differential effort. In general, this egalitarian turn seeks to position equality as the opportunity to apply differential efforts. This reconciliation is the attempt to identify and redress what Rawls called the ‘arbitrariness of fortune’. Liberals have tried a luck-​neutralizing impulse to these unmerited contingencies of life for distribution. Overall, they object to inequalities caused by luck. This luck-​neutralizing impulse has deep roots. John Stuart Mill, for example, observes that ‘the proportioning of remuneration to work done is really just only in so far as the more or less of the work is a matter of choice: when it depends on natural difference of strength or capacity, this principle of remuneration is itself an injustice’ (Mill 1877, 272). Closer to our times, Rawls argued that ‘intuitively, the most obvious injustice of the system of natural liberty is that it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by these factors so arbitrary from a moral point of view’ (Rawls 1971, 71). He emphasized that morally arbitrary social circumstance and radical contingencies should not be factored into an account of a ‘natural system of liberty’ or a person’s share thereof. G.A. Cohen agreed: ‘anyone who thinks that initial advantage and inherent capacity are unjust distributors thinks so because he believes that they make a person’s fate depend too much on sheer luck’ (Cohen 2011, 30). He explains that ‘a large part of the fundamental egalitarian aim is to extinguish the effect of brute luck on distribution. Brute luck is an enemy of just equality, and, since effects of genuine choice contrast with brute luck, genuine choice excuses otherwise unacceptable inequalities’ (Cohen 2011, 116). Typically, luck egalitarians object to inequalities that do not arise from personal choice. Indeed, many features that are morally irrelevant –​some arising from contingency (see Chapter 4) and moral luck (see Chapter 5) –​ become the basis of naturalizing, mystifying and justifying social inequalities. Cohen characterizes luck egalitarians in their efforts to ‘focus on the difference between people’s advantages, and they count that difference just if and only if it accords with a certain pattern in the relevant people’s choices’ (2011, 117). In this manner, one would need to think about 35

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responsibility and the ability to comprehend choice. In recent years, egalitarians have come to incorporate the moral significance of choice and responsibility into their considerations of equality. In On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, Cohen writes that egalitarianism’s ‘purpose is to eliminate involuntary disadvantage, by which I mean disadvantage for which the sufferer cannot be held responsible, since it does not appropriately reflect choices that he has made or would make’ (2011, 13). Inequalities and burdens of a person’s making are not held to be bad or take a lower priority when needing remedy. Here the goal is to make the distinction between chance and choice count regarding redistribution, and in so doing radically depart from rewards or disadvantages that arise from morally arbitrary means. Part of this turns on the recognition that these conditions could have been otherwise. Despite the aspiration of this reasoning, there are some difficulties. A society that attempts to neutralize disadvantages from luck to create equality of opportunity for individuals, but also to hold them accountable for their actions, faces a range of complex situations. In the case of health care, for example, situations may arise where imprudent or negligent individuals who make bad lifestyle choices are ranked lower in terms of service and resources than those who are sick because of their bad luck. Here the imprudent individual can be exposed to the risk of death and cannot claim healthcare except on the grounds of compassion. A society is not obliged to treat or assist the imprudent. Moreover, the imprudent are burdens on the system of distributions, taking away resources from those who are prudent. Yet, there is something harsh and vindictive about a philosophy that abandons the imprudent but neglects to assess their imprudence itself as a matter of luck. Such a view does not seem to promote human flourishing. To wit, capitalism is extremely detrimental to justice. This is because the commodity form cannot value or distribute items outside of simple equivalence-​exchange logics. Effectively, I am arguing that the process of commodification changes the very purpose of an item in a way that leaves it degraded and diminished. For instance, commodified healthcare impedes the alleviation of suffering because these outcomes are first filtered according to whether they can be afforded. Where the price cannot be paid, healthcare is denied. As another example, consider how people are tethered to actuarial assessments of their lives, credit scores and the widespread commodification of their labour. Yet subordinating human life to market forces, trading and expectations of return means that most people have a price put on them, which in turn has real effects on their life chances and social relations. Commodification typically quantifies areas of life that are qualitatively valued, neglecting that there are some values which trump prices, as when the derivative trading of household debt sets in motion debt collection efforts 36

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which ultimately come to undermine a person’s freedom and dignity. The systematically unreasonable and improper evaluation of things undermines the pursuit of justice. In short, the commodity form degrades social life. And so it is worth asking the question: is it fair to expect the working class to be reasonable about their exploitation?

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3

Where Liberalism Falls Short Daniel Bell’s (2000) The End of Ideology stands as an iconic marker of views surrounding the dismissal of that concept’s analytical utility in the late 20th and early 21st century. Of all the books written about ideology, its appearance is indicative of the ebbs and flows of the recent Western liberal imagination. Originally published in 1960, ‘in an era of unprecedented economic growth and material prosperity where more people have more faith in the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank than in the president of the United States’ (Gomes 2000, xvi), The End of Ideology was reprinted by Harvard University Press in 1988 and 2000. In each of these eras, it was common to hear pundits and professors proclaim that markets would unleash prosperity, creating a fulfilling society ripe with public goods. Yet, shortly following the cresting of liberal confidence about a consolidating order through the convergence of norms based upon industrial needs and technical delimitations gaining wide acceptance (with attendant proclamations that the ‘era of ideology contest is over’ in the high politics of social thought), counterparts are dramatically reasserting themselves to reject the ideological narrowness of the liberal order. As such, Bell’s book signifies a kind of anticipatory confidence about the potential of rational market logic-​driven decision making to bring peace if particularizing values were set to one side; an attitude that has very much reappeared through the celebratory codification of social life by the emerging nexus of artificial intelligence and neurology. Following the Obama administration, the high point of US liberalism to date in the 21st century, a fascistic backlash swept the country. While proponents of liberal democracy like to argue that their polity is unquestionably superior to the alternatives, liberals are faced with the conundrum of how to account for the ‘authoritarian turn’; that is, the rapid, fragmented de-​democratization currently being experienced worldwide. This process is so acute that Larry Diamond (2015) has called this a global ‘democratic recession’. Currently, some liberal theorists, like Jennifer Welsh (2016), are at pains to reassert that their commitments are correct. Part of this exercise involves re-​evaluating the concept of ideology, presuming that faulty or mistaken beliefs are central 38

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drivers to the recession. Yet, there is little introspection by liberals about the ideological components of this recession.

The end and return of history Controversies tend to reveal priors. This certainly holds with the furore around Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement of ‘the end of history’. While a researcher in Soviet politics at the RAND Corporation in 1988, he was struck when reading a speech by Gorbachev in which by Fukuyama’s own telling ‘[Gorbachev] said that the essence of socialism was competition’ (1999, 16). Whether Gorbachev meant this in the way that Fukuyama understood is debatable, but it is also somewhat beside the point. Rather, it is important to note that for Fukuyama this statement signalled the Hegelian notion of advancement through the resolution of apparent contradiction: if the USSR considered competition to be important, then the Hegelian resolution was the advancement of incentives as an important social institutional norm. Fukuyama held this point up to demonstrate that liberal democracy was the most suitable political system given the characteristics of humans. This was because this system sought to balance the individual’s ability to act on, and create their own, incentives while still providing some tendencies to create base opportunity and conditions for all without those tendencies undermining individuals’ incentives to act for themselves. For Fukuyama: Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-​ended but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an ‘end of history’: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. … It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled. (Fukuyama 2006, xii) That this situation emerged was due to economics and the struggle to recognize other humans as such. Effectively, liberal democracy was the order best suited to human beings given the precepts of a Rawlsian-​like moral anthropology. First advanced at an invited lecture at the University of Chicago’s John M. Olin Center, Fukuyama further developed the argument in a feature article for The National Interest (1989), and later expanded it into The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Essentially, Fukuyama’s foreclosure of other political organizations provided the intellectual support for the ‘there is no alternative’ argument advanced by early and mature neoliberals like Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton, respectively. 39

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Critics of Fukuyama virtually created a cottage industry, crafting critique after critique. By his own telling, Fukuyama has been ‘asked to reconsider and hopefully recant [his] End of History hypothesis at regular intervals virtually from the first month that it was published’ (1999, 16). There were also those who agreed in principle with Fukuyama, but who argued that other social-​cultural and political-​economic models such as Japan were a better template (Williams 1994). Retrospection after a decade hardly shifted Fukuyama. He maintained that: liberal democracy and a market-​oriented economic order are the only viable options for modern societies. The most serious developments in that period have been the economic crisis in Asia and the apparent stalling of reform in Russia. But while these developments are rich in lessons for policy, they are in the end correctable by policy and do not constitute systematic challenges to the prevailing liberal world order. (Fukuyama 1999, 16–​17) The late Derek Parfit’s quip that it is impossible to know what moral and political thought would look like given another thousand years of development best illustrates the tenor of the reply. Still, to be fair to Fukuyama, he did subsequently add a significant qualification regarding the possibility of technology threatening the dominant position of liberal democracy. In Our Posthuman Future as but one example, Fukuyama (2002) admitted that he neglected to consider how the use of genetic modifications to enhance human capacities, thereby increasing the ability of some relative to those that did not have genetic modifications, or the purchasing cost of new medical technologies would impact equality of opportunity. Despite these concessions, proponents of liberal social theory continued to celebrate, as they viewed the democratization wave in the early 1990s –​the ‘Third Wave’ (Huntington 1991) –​as endorsing the merits and successes of liberal democracy. This belief was leveraged against beliefs like Huntington’s (1996) ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, with its large geographic blocs entering antagonistic competition by counter-​proposing a more hopeful rendition of global cooperation based upon an overlapping consensus. Notwithstanding these clashes, there was a confidence belief that a relatively safe and stable political climate emerges from states providing support for businesses and incentives for individuals. In these conditions, sustaining freedom would not require much, if any, state intervention. In all these aspects, individual incentives are key influencing factors. So it is fair to say that the liberal historical closure that Fukuyama proposed is not widely supported, not even by the original proponent. Jennifer Welsh (2019), on the other hand, seeks to qualify Fukuyama, arguing for the supposedly unquestionable superiority of the liberal 40

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democratic polity while being aware, like Larry Diamond (2015), that a global ‘democratic recession’ means liberals must work to institutionalize their beliefs. Her four interlinked case studies illustrate where –​in her reading of history –​the confrontation between the West and Russia has prolonged the Syrian civil war, exacerbating the migration crisis, while domestic social inequality undermines the credibility of liberal democracies to satisfactorily solve these kinds of global problems. The stakes are high, and Welsh writes as if in a minority position, consoling liberals that their commitments are correct, but cajoling them to rally because they cannot afford to adopt a defensive posture. Welsh is correct, I believe, to argue against teleological reasoning, and so at a general level her thesis about advancing the ‘democratic imperative’ will likely find a sympathetic audience (2016, 9). But should it? I think she reaches a somewhat defendable conclusion (values are not self-​ guaranteeing) but via indefensible reasoning and a poor understanding of her cases. Hers is not a simplified argument but a simplistic one. As a crisp illustration, Fukuyama’s initial article was a 3,000-​word throwaway piece that caught on in the think tank crowd, the subsequent book capitalizing upon this commercial opportunity. I am not suggesting that Fukuyama was disingenuous, or that he did not encapsulate an ideological moment, but rather that he too had bills to pay and a career to pursue. These details tell us much about what Welsh misses. A ‘commercial imperative’ is very much a part of the various problems Welsh identifies, but the neglect of these forces produces a fatally partial account. Her inability, or unwillingness (it is hard to tell), to recognize the dynamics of global capitalism is an unnecessary, indeed fundamental limitation that hinders the robust analysis these topics warrant. This partiality leads to a major historical misreading of the Atlantic slave trade, the Second World War, post-​war decolonization and –​in a particularly strained linguistic avoidance of reality –​the ‘bureaucratic barriers’ (Welsh 2016, 17) to American racial equality, events Welsh raises to illustrate the success of liberal political development. Let me illustrate what I mean by a major historical misreading. One of Welsh’s narrative threads revolves around the American and the French Revolutions kick-​ starting the modern era of democratic governance. This is debatable, but what is not in dispute is the need to include the Haitian revolution if one were having that kind of discussion. This absence, a kind of ‘silencing of the past’ that Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (1995) wrote about, is telling about the mythology Welsh perpetuates, because even cursory attention to that revolution would raise questions about the deep connections between the commodity form, enslavement and the international slave trade that haunt all aspect of modernity and the Western conception of freedom. In short, Welsh neglects the role of the commercial imperative in distorting democracy. 41

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There are a few sporadic lines about slavery, but these exist only to the extent that they function to absolve liberal politics: here British abolition illustrates liberal democratic maturation. (Just imagine if Eric Williams were still alive!) And what of the harms? The ‘consolidation of democracy’, Welsh tells us, required ‘several revolutions of the mind’ (Welsh 2016, 17). Aside from the oblivious nature of these remarks, her framing of liberal political development as a ‘revolution of the mind’ papers over the intense, protracted struggles for freedoms and rights from those that had neither. Rather, for Welsh, enlightened rule brings freedom, not demands from those oppressed and exploited. The theme continues when assessing the 20th century, when she frames liberal democracy as caught in an international existential struggle with communism and fascism. She cites Churchill saying that a ‘new dark age’ would occur if fascism won. And for Welsh, liberal democracy did win: ‘A victory that was aided by high levels of economic growth, a bourgeoning middle class, and the expansion of the welfare state’ (Welsh 2016, 19). Whereas Welsh means that ‘the rise of market economies directly contributed to democracy’s consolidation’, the historical records show that fascism was not defeated by the United States or Britain, but rather at the cost of 20 million Russian lives on the Eastern Front. Similarly, in a section that reads like it was a tacked-​on afterthought, the ‘process of decolonization and its creation of new states in the developing world’, Welsh says, ‘brought about new democratic regimes’ (Welsh 2016, 19). Again, this is a misreading because Britain and France had denied the franchise to their colonial subjects or instituted such stringent property requirements that it limited mass participation. So again: not national liberation struggles but ever-​enlightening rulers. This is not a history with which I am familiar. Welsh’s faith in representative democracy fails to raise how it is conducive to ruling class capture. Then again, neoliberalism is not mentioned, either by name or by description, in her book. Interestingly, neither is the climate emergency, which is the biggest threat to planetary life. This absence is odd given how drought and crop failure aggravated the Syrian civil war and the various migration crises she covers. All in all, I find it hard to see how the ‘revolution of the mind’, even as a metaphor, can be useful in solving problems like mass conflict driving migration, global inequality and authoritarianism. The problem I have is not that Welsh does not share my analytical frame, but that she neglects to even explore the possibility that markets themselves are part of the problem. In not engaging with the best of her avowed political philosophy, Welsh has produced a weak version of liberalism, one that Rawls et al would likely not recognize. If a stray line could reveal an entire ideology, Welsh provides many opportunities for that exercise. My view is that her good-​faith effort to link global predicaments is not helpful enough, particularly given the stakes 42

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Welsh herself identifies. And, in my less charitable moments, I think her conceptual framework reproduces the basic political mythology that permits the violence Welsh clearly wishes to end. Much of this has to do with the neglect of ideology and value struggles in contemporary liberalism.

Further critiques of liberal social theory As the previous section illustrated, liberal social theory is mistaken in several places, and these errors traverse the philosophical and historical. However, they also include ordinary politics. For example, one difficulty with Rawls’ solution to intractable ontological politics (to be discussed later) was immediately evident with the rise of the conservative and libertarian ideological bloc in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. This bloc dramatically changed the American intellectual landscape, particularly by forcing liberals to soften their defence of New Deal and Great Society social programmes, in turn leading to the installation of neoliberal ideology in the commanding heights of the US political economy. Arguably, liberal politics capitulated to the conservatism agenda. Rawls’ career trajectory provides a good example of this conservative conceptual drift. When reading A Theory of Justice, one is immediately struck by the core attention to economic and social questions. Rawls grapples with the legitimacy of allocation, redistribution and welfare, questions that are all immediate by-​products of property relations, ownership of the means of production and ideological choices that justify the implicit social acceptance of the accumulation of wealth accrued through the work of others. Rawls does not believe any of these are an adequate foundation for a society concerned with advancing principles of fairness where persons can select their own ends. However, facing much critique –​some legitimate, some less so –​Rawls’ conservative critics pulled liberal social theory away from a critical treatment of economics and towards questions of rational administration. The by-​product was that issues like social inequality became subsidiary concerns in the high strata of US intellectual politics. This is one reason, albeit a major one, for extensive sympathetic criticism of the wider tradition of liberal political philosophy that I undertake in this book. Currently, Paul Kahn, a preeminent American contemporary conservative philosopher, argues that liberalism cannot provide a sufficient aspiration for US politics. He charges that liberals proclaim that basic principles of justice –​ universality and consistency, for e­ xample –​apply to all. But this does not match the bare facts of institutional practices, such as selective enforcement of the law. To explain such facts, liberals tend to point to poor governance, the lack of accountability and the like. Kahn objects, stipulating that selective enforcement is a systematic feature of the political enterprise: enforcement of the law rests not upon compelling norms, but rather on the willingness 43

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of political actors to use it as a tool to advance their agendas and secure their positions. All applications of law are the results of decisions. Further, Kahn points out, liberals are often somewhat blind to how factional interests seek to capture institutions and abuse them for their narrow ends in the formation of policy. To the degree they are aware of these practices, liberals understand them through the lens of institutional failure or corruption, and hence the need for constant oversight to ensure that these same narrow self-​interests do not capture the very entities established to police or control. Liberals neglect to see that the institutions are often well maintained by these narrow interests and are duly diligent in performing most of their tasks, but do not follow through when the stakes affect certain narrow interests. Liberals like to believe that institutions are self-​correcting, but that they also need constant reform to match the ideal measure that liberalism proposes, hence the appeal to public reason, or reason, to displace the narrow interests. But such appeals are ultimately unsatisfying. In his estimation, the liberal tradition is unable to do this. It is at a ‘dead end’, merely ‘offering minor variation on tired arguments’ (Kahn 2011b). Kahn adds to this critique by suggesting that ‘Rawls and his followers never took seriously the violence of the state’, because the threat of ‘mutual assured destruction never appears within liberal political theory’; further, ‘the defence policies of the United States are always seen as somehow exceptional –​more transitional arrangements than expressions of national identity’ (Kahn 2011a, 7). In other words, liberal social theory overlooks the salient violence in American politics. Kahn uses this charge to indict the ideal of justice as fairness; for if justice relies upon the state for implementation, and that social institution at its very core is violent and corrupt, then how can any system of justice implemented in its name be just? There are certainly some ready insights in these words, but Khan’s characterization is a bit disingenuous. This is because of the governmentality of neoliberal revanche commodified violence through private prisons, fostering an industry for militarized policing and downstream markets for mass surveillance. Liberal activists and civil society organizations voraciously fought many of these developments, only to be on the losing side. Liberalism has other critics too, which are sympathetic and antagonistic alike. Contemporary Marxists charge that the basic structure and original position foreclose the possibility of political contention, subordinating all politics to secondary instrumentalization, or administrative tinkering in simpler terms. Pragmatists object that the basic structure is ‘one class inside one epoch’ masquerading as a final vocabulary. Feminists take issue with a philosophy they claim does not entertain actual bodies. Civic republicans take umbrage at liberals suggesting that cultural goods can be accommodated by liberal protections. Activist political commentators, such as Chris Hedges (2010), point towards a ‘Liberal Deficit’ where liberal politics cannot make 44

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good on its promises because liberalism neglects to directly address capitalism’s exploitation, thereby capitulating to power. So, liberals face irrelevance at best, extinction at worst. Marxists take this critique one step further, arguing that liberalism overlooks how market systems alienate persons because liberals are in an alliance with capital. Erich Fromm expressed this neatly in Escape From Freedom: Battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privileges to defend. While a class was fighting for its own liberation from domination, it believed itself to be fighting for human freedom as such and thus was able to appeal to an ideal, to the longing for freedom rooted in all who are oppressed. (Fromm 1969, 17) Historical records tend to show that after waves of expanded rights, the ruling classes became wary of the pace of change, and so stalled and retarded the expansion of rights (Tilly 2007). Fromm was acutely aware that circumstances change once liberation has been achieved: ‘In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended’ (1969, 17). He warns that the outcome of contention can be co-​opted through concession. There are critiques from other vantage points too. For example, critical race theorists have objected to the essentialist conception of the liberal person, liberalism’s structural determinism and the inconsistent application of first principles (Delgado and Stefancic 1993). Citing structural discrimination, Richard Delgado rightly points out that racialized persons have a different frame of reference that allows them to appreciate the oppression and discrimination that societal members belonging to hegemonic whiteness miss. Liberalism, clearly, does not look promising from this standpoint. Similarly, Derrick Bell (1995) has, correctly in my view, argued that the American constitution, often described as the institutional embodiment of liberal ideals, privileged property over justice. Due to this longstanding entrenchment, he proposes an interest convergence theory to account for the instances of extending justice. The theory states that racial advances and civil emancipation will only come about when they align with the interests of the (white) elite (Bell 1995). Extending this thesis in his essay on ‘the price of racial remedies’, Bell’s (1979) conjecture is that the project of hegemonic whiteness will fail to support civil rights policies if such policies threaten the social standing of the white historical bloc. In sum, critical race theory charges liberalism with perpetuating the pretence that the rule of law subordinates all subjects in modern states without exception. This is a similar conclusion, albeit for different reasons, to that offered by 45

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postcolonial and poststructuralist repudiations of liberalism. Uniting these critiques is the belief that liberalism does not support social movements but instead facilitates imperial actions. In another, more self-​consciously conservative, line of thought, several religious traditions (e.g. United States Catholicism) see liberalism, with its freedom of consciousness and endorsement of the separation of church and state, as hostile to the presumed public place of religious belief (e.g. Deneen 2018; Mitchell 2019). But such religious traditions overlook how a comprehensive conception of the good automatically conflicts with the freedom of consciousness (which was in part developed to protect religious belief), and how religious practice has been used as a coercive force for conduct and behaviour that might otherwise be morally unobjectionable. For this reason, liberals render the ideal state as procedurally neutral without predesignated goods. So, while liberalism has had a long history of trying to make accommodations for religious groups that reject liberal principles, liberals maintain that the state holds the right to intervene in the affairs of these groups should there be evidence of unjustified coercion, constraint from voluntary exit and cognitive manipulation. Building on these remarks, Charles Taylor (1994) argues that the difficulty with reasonable accommodation lies in how a liberal conceptual demarcation of the person is alienated from what it is like to be a person with ideas and desires. He does not valorize traditional or classical accounts of the person but does think that the liberal moral psychology does not seem to correspond to the ordinary and social life in which people participate. In contemporary social life, recognition is an articulation that another is a meaningful ethical agent. Effectively, Taylor (1989) thinks that the person ought to develop an adequate spiritual and immanent metaphysics which attunes the inward-​looking self to God. As an alternative, he emphasizes the need to take a more historical view of the development of the liberal subject. He demonstrated how our current concept of the self is linked to modernity –​in plainer terms, that the idea of the person itself has a history. For this reason, Taylor is reluctant to define the person in strict naturalistic terms, or at least in terms that have little room for a moral quotient. Much as Macpherson references Locke as developing possessive individualism, so too Taylor thinks that errors in personal identity reach as far back as Locke, where the self is reduced to an atomized individual to create methodological individualism. This atomization can also be seen in the British utilitarianism of Mill, Bentham and Spencer, with post-​war advocates including Karl Popper. With the move to a morality-​based understanding of liberalism and liberty, methodological individualism is generally supported by appealing to the person as the primary philosophical entity. This is because persons are the entities that make selections and have free will and agency. There have been important criticisms of this position, most notably by British 46

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idealists and US reformers such as Hobhouse and Dewey. Indeed, it was only when historical conditions changed such that political representation was possible for wider numbers of people that liberal arguments opposing methodological individualism began to gain traction. The good life no longer needs to be confined to giving advice and seeking better courses of action under constrained circumstances. As almost all the critiques I have outlined have their metaphysical commitments and ontological registers, in the next section I turn my attention to how liberal social theory treats these views.

Avoiding ontological politics During the 20th century there were various conceptualizations of subjective comprehension that conflated the narrow interests of the elites as those of society as a whole. Ideology, myth, false consciousness, ruling relations, fetishism, hegemony, doxa and discourse are but a few examples of this exercise. These concepts were partly a result of different theoretical vernaculars, with their unique ascents and acute descriptions, as well as the tight or narrow scope and scale of attention to the production, distribution, circulation or consumption of ideas. One might suppose that at one level smoothing out these differences requires some methodological tidying –​perhaps a lot of it –​but with some good-​faith cooperation it could be accomplished. However, as Colin Hay asks, how possible is it that ‘theorists and critics from divergent ethical and political stances who are unlikely to agree upon the legitimacy of the actions of the powerful’ will be ‘able to share a common analysis of the distribution and exercise of power within a given social and political context’ (Hay 2002, 186–​7)? Hay is pointing to a fundamental incommunicability between different theories that makes the study of ideology itself open to charges of being ideological. And for these reasons it is doubtful if the debate over ideology will cease or find easy resolution, simply because such a task is not only prone to an intellectual sectarian melee, but also because of foundational normative incommunicability. Ordinarily, traditional Marxists tend to identify ideology as a superstructure of thought which reproduces beliefs which –​irrespective of whether they are or are not truthful in the strict sense of the term –​stand to foreclose the social struggle predicated on the known harms of capitalism. Granted, this is somewhat of a simplified version of the more philosophical Marxian conception of the distinction between appearance and reality, which itself rests on a correspondence theory of truth where valid claims must match what is known about reality as such. Nevertheless, at the root of the contest are two drives which play out on the conceptual level. The first is the desire to account for the whole of the social world. The second drive branches from the first in that it is a concern for a realist epistemology to ground 47

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totality. The Weberian critique of this totalizing material realism is less directed at the epistemology per se, and is instead located in the motivation for the concept itself to find meaning in ‘the whole of human life’. Weber argues that humans have an ‘inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos’ (1963, 117), to create coherence out of contingency. To put the same sentiment in a different form: as humans are the kinds of creatures that seek ends, so the argument runs, we labour to create coherent meaning in and about the world. Accordingly, what Marxists adopt as a methodological prior is less objective analysis and more a socially conditioned impulse that itself requires methodologies to reveal. Marxists would likely object, but after several rounds of this kind of debate it is easy to see how this can boil down to ontological politics. Anticipating these kinds of stalemates, John Rawls offered one of the preeminent philosophical solutions to reroute arguments so that they do reach the point of ontological politics. He proposed that persons are both free and able to choose their ends and purposes: as a ‘self-​originating source of valid claims’, persons do not need to resort to appeals to custom nor traditions. In this conception, persons are self-​defining subjects. This argument trades upon the premise that a subject can best flourish when the state retreats from defending any one conception of the good. This argument is often described as ‘the priority of the right over the good’, and it speaks to two interrelated concerns. The first is that individual rights are not to be sacrificed for the general good, and the second is that these rights are not premised on any one vision of the good life. A compromise on either of these points is to concede and impose a kind of coercion. Per Rawls, one of the best ways to manage ontological politics was to create a procedural political epistemology to design political orders that could accommodate or select between these different ontologies while maintaining a degree of social coherence (also see Chapter 2). The kernel of this procedure was the emblematic claim that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’, wherein ‘justice, fairness, and individual rights’ have pride of place. This modified Kantian position offered a ‘liberating vision’ unconstrained by antecedent values, placing it at a disjuncture from teleological and utilitarian theories of justice. The liberal objection to teleology was based on the fact that it imposed but one among many various competing visions, while the objection to utilitarianism highlighted how talents and asserts are matters of luck and so morally arbitrary. A more viable agenda for justice would be to ‘improve the situation of those who have lost out’. Rawls’ original position requires that one design a social order behind a veil of ignorance in which a person does not know beforehand which position they would later occupy. Sandel writes that this immensely influential original position becomes ‘thoroughly embodied in the practices and institutions most central to our public life’ (2005, 158). The principles that emerge from such 48

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an exercise are said to not favour any one end and so could be described as ‘neutral’ provided they allow consistent liberty for all. The practical result of this kind of liberal social theory is the belief that the government could mediate modern social and economic interactions. By acting as an impartial distributor of resources to competing interests, they would keep the state together. So, liberal social theory, as much as it was a response to changing economic conditions, was also an attempt to control those same changes. Most importantly, it was not seen as an ideological endeavour, but rather as a method for remedying ideology.

Tensions in intersubjective agreement At the core of liberal thought are a series of tensions, like majority rule and minority rights, or a capable yet checked state. There is also a significant tension between the attempt to provide reward structures that celebrate merit yet also provide a modicum of equality of condition. The latter tension is intimately connected to any consideration of how meaningful political engagement in liberal democracies is possible with significant levels of social inequality. Another tension is the pull between self and other. We can roughly describe this as the attempt to bring about an I–​Thou relationship. Distinct from relations between persons and objects, this relationship is an attitude which aims to recognize and respect the essential uniqueness of another self with powers of personhood comparable to one’s own, while acknowledging their partiality and projects. As Buber writes, ‘we can give and accept the Thou’. This is because, at least for person–​person relationships, ‘it is a form of speech’. Buber describes the Thou relation as an experience that ‘establishes the world of relation’ that applies not only to persons, but to ‘our life with nature’, ‘men’ and ‘intelligible forms’. The relation is to the item itself, its essence (Buber 2000). The implication is that to extend recognition and feel concern for others is to see them as persons like us. Further, to recognize ourselves in their position, there needs to be some empathy based upon common reference groups. Despite the I–​Thou conceptualization appearing early in A Theory of Justice, Rawls was reluctant to base his version of liberalism solely on metaphysical foundations. Therefore, he insisted that successful politics necessarily requires that issues of justice remain understood purely in political terms without metaphysical implications. Despite my admiration for his desire to avoid conflict, Rawls’ attempts to downplay metaphysics are not fully convincing. This is because liberalism presumes the potential existence of a particular kind of person; namely, a person willing and able to act in a deliberate manner. To my mind, liberals have an anthropology that maintains that a person can act well or poorly, justice is a human virtue and political structures can be designed to respond to a person’s desire for freedom and 49

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autonomy. Within this anthropology, language plays a considerable role in conveying reasons for actions. Consider that Tilly showed how liberal democracy gives citizens a significant influence over rulers’ performance. In his essay ‘Grudging Consent’, he notes how undemocratic regimes do not need to worry about which sort of government subjects would prefer or what sorts of actions they would tolerate. However, in contemporary democratic regimes, this is a constant worry because democratization has meant that citizen-​subjects have both the voice and means to convey their displeasure and limits. This gives citizens considerable ‘influence over rulers’ performance’ (Tilly 2007). Tilly adds that the quality of the voice of citizen-​subjects can be analysed along four attributes: breadth, equality, binding and protection. Democratization moves ‘toward a broader range of popular voices; toward greater equality among these voices; toward the increased binding of rulers’ actions by popular voice; and toward greater protection of popular voice from arbitrary action by rulers and their agents’ (Tilly 2007). Taken together, this Kantian-​inspired anthropology and the specific conception of freedom it generates demarcate a debate over whether abstract reason or the living corporeal person provides the keystone for liberal philosophy. If reason is given priority, then the individual agent must subordinate his or her will to it. Thus, the uniqueness of the body matters little except in its ability to acknowledge and act out the good. Critics argue that the disappearance of the body is unrealistic at best and anti-​human at worst. Conversely, if the person is given priority, then the body is the site at which reason is grasped and desired; herein existing interests and circumstances must be accommodated or discarded within the conception of liberty. The source of this tension is the difficulty of determining the precise limits of interests and preferences, and the attempt to balance conflicting wills. In any case, the plausibility of comprehensive rights or goods hinges upon the weight given to each view. Liberals have an affinity for the giving and taking of reasons. This proclivity exists because liberalism conceives of itself as a kind of expressive rationality that relies upon the command of language. The exchange of reasons allows persons, even strangers, to impartially hold each other to account. Accordingly, one must push back against those who render impartiality as indifference rather than a substantive effort to engage another person without undue favour. The concern with the self ’s interest either to select projects or to pursue them unhindered does little to secure a common set of values that articulates a genuine and embracing social order. This is often the line of a communitarian critique of liberalism. So liberals are committed to the public justification of claims on themselves and on others, all the while being willing to (if grudgingly) consent to the best reason available. This is the application of reason to the tension between partiality and impartiality. 50

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This can take the form of procedural concerns for making claims and the substance of the claims themselves. Underwriting these two claims is the ‘separateness of persons’ who can give and take reasons. For example, against crude utilitarianism, which deliberately failed to account for the status of persons, both Rawls and Nozick argued that the separateness of persons mattered greatly in political decision making. In a slight modification, Sandel pointed out that the ‘separateness of persons’ did not separate a person from social commitments, becoming or being. In other words, persons are socially encumbered creatures with intersubjective needs. Taylor (1989) took Sandel a step further, historicizing a person’s encumberedness, to show that the person is an idea. These modifications to Rawls are attempts to navigate the obstacles posed by second-​order problems of personal identity. By contrast, Sandel and Parfit, and to a lesser degree Taylor, argued instead to consider different areas of concern. The perspective they advance uses the fragmentation of value to lobby for distinct and discrete spheres of justice. The difficulty here is not pluralism, but rather boundary bickering as to what item falls under which sphere, and even what happens when items can reasonably be put into multiple spheres. Parfit best represents the view that rational introspection can give rise to the normativity of reasons themselves. Having analysed notable personal and moral dilemmas from 20th-​century philosophy of action, he favours a balancing of the tensions between short-​and long-​term good, attitudes to time and various partial interests. The best means to strike this balance is a qualified utilitarianism in which the self is subordinated to reason. Here, all or nothing personal identity is downplayed in favour of physical and psychological continuity. Therefore, it is understandable how a person can be rationally irrational because pluralism opens the possibility of complex conflicts between values and goals. Certainly, there are other liberals who have been more explicit about this. John Dewey (2018), for instance, is well known for the view that democratic life is a form of associated living. The meaning of liberalism rests not on its processes but on its objectives within the world, as liberals come to conceive of that world. Mill has a similar view of liberalism. In On Liberty, he describes liberalism as a philosophical method with rational accord that is central to this exercise (1991). What Mill is expressing is that dialogical exchanges can help produce the truth. This is his reason why free expression ought to be protected, for this is a method to find and establish truths while assessing what people believe. Rendered in contemporary terms, we might say that the liberal inquiry rests when ‘there is nothing else to think on the matter’. This limits the pit of endless discussion. The reasons are good, extensive and cogent. If an error were found in an explanation or a description, then there would be more to think and say. But until errors are found, sometimes there is just nothing else to think, nothing else to say on a matter. 51

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There is some comfort in reading Mill and Dewey. They do not really consider the susceptibility of persons to false convictions, erroneous beliefs, motivated reasoning, the sway of ideology or the power of media enterprises dedicated to persuasion. That these conditions of the world did not enter their works shows not wilful blindness but rather a bona fide belief in a person’s ability to impartially assess the merits of their views. Sadly, however, I do not think such conceptions are sustainable. This attention to discourse is well meaning but erroneous. It is not always possible to turn an-​other into another (or to use Buber’s terms, to establish an I–​Thou relationship). The presumption that continual engagement opens the door to understanding is unrealistic: sometimes, more talk just leads to more disagreement. Liberalism, correctly in my views, has sometimes been criticized as a political system in which talk and speech is fetishized (conversation, debate, the press and parliament) to a point where there is a widespread failure to understand the dynamics of socio-​material or non-​linguistic conflict.

Procedures are not enough There are two sociological ramifications of liberal social theory and the procedural liberal state it promotes to circumvent ontological politics. The first is the undue limitation of democratic possibilities, and the second is that it subverts the society needed to maintain democratic provisions. To begin addressing this series of errors, it is important to reconsider the liberal conceptual stance. This stance proposes a distance between a person’s values and who they are. Liberals say that a person’s identity is subordinate to the values they strive for. Therefore, no pre-​existing moral or civic commitments define any one person; nor should they. With regards to personhood, what matters for liberals is ‘not the ends we choose but our capacity to choose them’. Sandel describes this position as ‘the right is prior to the good, so the self is prior to its ends’ (Sandel 1996, 64). The problem with this conceptualization is that it treats identity as coincidental rather than constitutive; that the capacity for choice always takes precedence over the community. To put it differently, the voluntary commitments people make affirm first the ability to select between ends free from antecedent constraints. But this incorrectly assumes that pursuing ends themselves is cooperative, meaning that belonging is vital to be successful in many endeavours. So, the philosophical anthropology of liberalism is misleading since no person can be unencumbered. Rather, a person’s identities come from their communities and associated attachments that have a depth beyond the voluntary obligation or ‘natural duties’ owed to other human beings. So, contrary to liberal social theory, it is difficult to understand persons as separable from history. The

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belief that one should reason through the world as if they were unencumbered is impractical. The logic of the unencumbered self implies that desert claims cannot be predicated upon a person’s contingent uncultivated characteristics. However, it is difficult, nay impossible, to understand persons as separable from history. The allegiances that come from family, community, nation and the like are obligations more than values, and thus cannot be held at a certain distance. These commitments, arising from history, have a depth which is beyond the voluntary obligation or ‘natural duties’ owed to other human beings as such. When these attachments and allegiances are taken together, they define a person. What I mean is that persons are historical creatures, always already within communities and commitments which, even if they are not wholly constitutive of the self, certainly anchor the self. The second error concerns whether proceduralism can deliver substantive justice. For instance, as Sandel says, ‘the difference principle is a principle of sharing. As such, it must presuppose some prior moral tie among those whose assets it would deploy and whose efforts it would enlist in a common endeavor’ (Sandel 2005, 166). Sharing like this requires a broad collective project; one that liberals are unwilling to stipulate. In other words, instead of productive cooperation that constitutes entanglements, the difference principle offers estrangement from the very people one wants to live beside. In effect, the difference principle cannot provide what it practically requires in reproducing society because it battles to acknowledge that there are moral entanglements at play. As Sandel writes, ‘the moral encumbrances and antecedent obligations they imply would undercut the priority of right’ (Sandel 2005, 167). This is because persons cannot be independent if their identity is tied to aims and attachments, for the moral cost of abandoning them is estrangement. Let us consider the nature of political rights. One of the core functions of rights is to protect persons, and so they are a valuable resource in liberal politics. Still rights and claims expand and grow. Assuring and enforcing these rights necessarily requires a complex bureaucracy to administer claims, and this itself is backed by concentrated state power. Soon this administrative enterprise becomes the object of politics as different factions seek to seize it. Inadvertently, liberal social theory creates the very institutions that can be, and are, able to unduly constrain people. Direct and participatory democracy is weakened, and thus institutions suffer. Given the importance of rights and the various vulgarities of rulers, the management of claims is removed from the orbit of elected representatives and instead housed in the bureaucracy itself, which is said to be insulated from democratic impulses. Supposedly, this is a better mechanism for making value judgements about social life. But in fact, it renders people powerless, labouring under regimes they neither expected or choose and increasingly seek to reject.

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A related criticism is that liberals neglect the space between the state and the individual. This is the space occupied by, among others, family, communities and civic and religious institutions. These associations can be used to ward off the state. Taylor, for instance, emphasizes that liberalism often overlooks how peoples’ ties to their communities have an inherent value aside from being a means to advance a certain other end. His concern is that actual values and motivations are neglected when liberals give priority to the right over the good. Their variation of justice seeks grounding in a tradition of solidarity and community, with political considerations being open to public contributions; further, they take different stances on the meaning of rights, equality and constitutions. Effectively, the dispute between liberals and communitarians turns on differing conceptions of the nature of the self and the tasks of political theory. Whereas Rawls’ liberalism sought to reconcile value pluralism with issues such as rights and goods, values and distributions, civic republicans attended to the social nature of human beings. They argued that while Rawls’ method is neat and tidy in proposing a case of precise agreement, it promotes an abstract disembodied and ‘pure chooser’ conception of the individual. For them, the error has two implications. First, free will and autonomy exist to the degree that one accepts the basic structure which emerges from this position. If this is the case, the conundrum emerges as to how one can both value liberty and accept any one conception of the good. Second, this comes at the expense of acknowledging that persons are created in lived circumstances with real social relations. This error overlooks that a person’s commitments, values and projects are not incidental but rather constitute the self. The conclusion is that liberalism offers little practical political conduct and argument, thereby falling short of its own aspirations. By attending to the public good, persons contribute to the evocation and maintenance of their society, which then allows them to pursue the ends of their choosing: their good life. Thus, deliberation and wide participation are features of civic-​republican politics. For this reason, communitarians emphasize virtues and the conditions that are required for their cultivation, all the while aspiring for the excellence of virtues. In this view, judgement is a foundational virtue. As communitarians reject the pure chooser and pre-​social liberal self, they are forced to reconcile the value of cultural membership with inherited commitments and traditions. But a problem arises in that the wholesale endorsement of diverse inherited commitments offers little comment on the normative content of these cultures’ practices. Moreover, a person’s or group’s attachment to and interest in a practice is insufficient justification for that practice. Nevertheless, it is this partial attachment that gives people meaning in their lives. In this respect, the communitarian critique of liberal agency is reminiscent of earlier critiques, such as C.B. Macpherson’s theory of possessive 54

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individualism and Marx’s theory of alienation. These critiques share the concern that individualism neglects to acknowledge that persons have a socially constituted nature; that is, that persons are not asocial, or pre-​ social, but come into existence through social interaction and encounters. The presumption is that a bond exists between a person belonging to their community, the positive kinds of duties that come from participation in these activities and the goods that they produce that advance the common good and the personal good. To some degree, the catalogue of complaints in this chapter comes from liberal critics failing to concede that real political mechanics play out differently than philosophical ideas. The liberal state works better in some places than in others, despite these places broadly subscribing to liberalism. Moreover, critics themselves often overlook how political efforts to disrupt liberalism themselves hinder liberalism from making good on its ideals. Liberalism is hardly the dominant or even sole intellectual tradition, nor is it without robust intramural debate. This is not to suggest that the political contention of liberalism should cease, but rather to underscore the real political mechanics. Take, for example, the claims that liberals are at peace with the state. This charge is used as a proxy to indict redistributive justice; for if justice relies upon the state for implementation, but that social institution at its core is violent and corrupt, then how likely is it that any system of justice implemented by it will be just? It is true that they appeal to the state to undertake actions, such as more humane incarceration, better education and food policies, less military adventurism and so on. This criticism, contention and agitation for improvement is not the same as blanket acceptance. So these critics fall into the trap of sentimentalism, believing incorrectly that the absence of a particular kind of demonstrated concern for a particular topic indicates its absence altogether. The warning, then, is not to view social phenomena in their dynamic totality. While one must not believe that an impartial appreciation of totality will be the panacea to the problem of liberal order and the resolution of value conflict, it does go some way to help assess the distribution of various kinds of goods. But this does not negate that genuine value conflicts exist, or that reasonable people can and do make different decisions on the best way of life. For the objectivist, this is because everyone has unique capacities for which they must develop as they see fit; for the pluralist it is because values are too numerous to be simply reconciled; and for the subjectivist, it is because preferences and tastes exist and differ from person to person.

A liberal social imaginary The critiques outlined in this chapter are not relics of the late 20th-​century debate, but are still applicable given that the underlying assumption –​the 55

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very target of those critiques –​remained unaccounted for in Jennifer Welsh’s recent work. For her, rights are managed by enlightened rulers who use technical enterprises to impartially decide the allocation of resources. This conception of politics ignores the central contradictions in liberal democracies: societies that are all too comfortable abiding by the imperatives set by modern capitalism. It is, if you will, that liberal social theory remains stuck in an intellectual cul-​de-​sac, unmoved by critique. Ironically, given Welsh’s attempt to highlight the role of history, the prime weakness of liberal social theory is its ahistorical inclinations and tendencies. So not much has changed since liberal social theorists like Daniel Bell (2000) mistakenly believed that late modernity would usher in complex prosperous post-​industrial societies. Supposedly the inevitable existence of such societies would diffuse political questions by quelling normative disputes and ontological politics by creating procedures. This proceduralism is supposed to be everlasting, meaning that politics becomes less about contests over the future of the social structure and more about the administration of various risks as and when they become (better) understood; the best approach to this management is through evidence-​based public policy. The confidence in this belief was affirmed when, towards the end of the century, the ‘end of ideology’ thesis presumed that the end of the Cold War would mean that major value disagreement had, or would soon, cease. While politics would continue, it would be in the form of market competition and the general administration of everyday life, not disputes over political formation. Jennifer Welsh recognizes the limitations of this assumption but stops short of treating neoliberal economics to the same level of scrutiny or noting how this set of economic beliefs and practices caters primarily to the already wealthy. Given the cumulative advantages of ‘the most advantaged’, this class is best positioned to conceptualize, advocate for, design, implement, monitor and evaluate policy. Altogether, their commanding position allows them to sideline struggle over production as a central point of conflict and contradiction in liberal democracies. As such, there are echoes of Bell’s misreading of the material developments in historically situated settings, one that ignores struggles emanating from ‘the least advantaged’. Again, the problem is a failure to recognize the centrality (but not exclusivity) of class to any analysis of contemporary societies. While there are certainly achievements in the expansion of rights and entitlements, late 20th-​century and early 21st-​century liberal social theory has two primary errors –​a mistaken anthropology and a mistaken project –​ which together beget a contradiction insofar as proceduralism reproduces the very conditions that make certain kinds of people vulnerable. The result is a public life which is ‘more entangled, less attached’. Estrangement becomes a general feature of life in liberal democracies as persons just become tokens to be administered by rational decision makers who follow 56

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narrow and pre-​established procedures. The problem is intensified as the scale of state bureaucracy expands. In becoming ever more comprehensive, the by-​product is that liberal democracies regulate the commodification of human relationships driven by capitalism’s accumulation impulse. By not suitably addressing class antagonisms and other social problems, the politics within liberal democracies leads to the fragmentation of collective public life. Liberalism has typically neglected fair consideration of some of the destructive forces of capitalism. In that sense, liberalism needs methodological assistance –​Marxism contributes a sensitivity and explanatory insight that liberalism often lacks.

Enrolling Marxian methodologies In lay thought, Marxists are often solely associated with a radical redistribution politics. This is because Marxist-​inspired political movements have long maintained that they can end class oppression, exploitation and social inequality. But such an attitude is a partial mischaracterization of Marx’s own theory. This is because the central problem for Marx is not social or economic inequality per se. Rather, it is the problem of alienation. Indeed, the Marxist critique of inequality is arguably a by-​product of the critique of alienation. Inequality certainly creates disproportionate hardships and burdens for the working class. But more importantly, Marx argues, through instrumental and objectifying social relations, capitalism distorts and degrades the character of humans ‘species being’. In Marx’s vision of capitalism, the rich world of human social relations has been transformed into an alienating fantasy world of relations between things. Most of all, human beings’ own labour power, their very potential to produce the conditions of their existence, takes on an objective form as a commodity and commands them. In this way, capitalism works against the autonomy and the ability of all societal members to pursue their projects and develop their capabilities. There is considerable debate over whether Marx specified precise beliefs regarding the value of morality and justice, and whether these beliefs are indeed consistent and constant. Cohen (1981) writes that revolutionary Marxism neglects that a conception of justice is at the core of the political project, while Christine Sypnowich (1990) argues that Marx’s critique of capitalism appeals to dignity despite his position that historical materialism proposes that dignity is a historical product. Beyond the general idea that economic inequality limits political equality, traditional Marxists have even less to say about moral and ethical questions. Absent are discussions of scope, content, who is to be equal and when, or over what period equality is to be measured. While Marxist theory offers extremely valuable insights, it has little to say about the construction of democratic institutions. Neither does traditional Marxism offer much commentary on justice, other than to 57

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indict it as a form of bourgeois ideology. Marx himself felt strongly that any progressive politics worth its name necessarily required a transcendence of ‘mere’ philosophical speculation. The goal was the realization of philosophy in social events, a need to ‘change’ the world instead of interpreting it. I am not entirely convinced by Marxism’s agonistic attitude to ethics. To me, the language of exploitation in Marx’s work, as well as his writings on alienation and species being, certainly condemn capitalist social relations for their injustice. Neither do I think it is contradictory to critique the ideology that passes for ethics –​to critique the ideology that disguises exploitation –​while endorsing ethical ideals and reasoning that take account of ‘the whole man’. Forgetting this conflates explanation with evaluation, in turn diminishing how the latter guides the former. And so, over the course of this book, I aim to show that Marxist critique has much to offer the ethical evaluation of political practices. Certain kinds of lucky experiences and certain kinds of misfortune need not be inevitable; they need not create and reproduce deep inequalities. Through distinguishing hard and institutional luck, I aim to demonstrate the role played by economic structures in widening inequality when they make the contingent features of the person solid social determinants. This institutional intervention to perpetuate misfortune alienates people from cultivating their capacities and improving their prospects. By contrast, the amelioration of economic inequality requires a major redistribution of life chances considering the conditions under which these chances are produced. This necessitates redistributing the resources of a society to afford genuine quality prospects for people to enrich themselves. Granted, it is hard to imagine this concession of power to be accomplished solely by appeals to moral volition. Revivals are rare, liberal ameliorative reforms are easily eroded and political parties are cautious of electoral defeat while civil society lacks institutional power. But redistribution sets in motion preconditions for economic development and greater political participation by putting resources into the range of persons who would otherwise be excluded. Ultimately, the target of the argument in this book is to limit how contingency, chance and choice are used to justify discrimination, exploitation and alienation.

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The Problem of Contingency In his Lecture on Ethics, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, ‘if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world’ (1965, 7). This is because, in Wittgenstein’s view, ethical writing in the 20th century was too often affiliated with specific political-​economic projects or religious traditions. To overcome this situation, moral philosophers and value theorists sought to disentangle ethics from these shadows. But, in doing so, moral theory became bogged down in second-​order bickering of the kind surveyed in the past two chapters. Bernard Williams was heavy hearted when he considered this development. Although generally in favour of the project of moral theory, he was disconcerted by the prevailing efforts of moral realism, purposefully labelling them a ‘peculiar institution’. Derik Parfit captures this attitude well; he writes that ‘Williams has a real target here. Many philosophers had hoped to find moral argument, or truths, that could not fail to motivate us. Williams, realistically, rejects that hope’ (Parfit 1997, 111). Williams lamented that morality had come to be encumbered by modernity. Like Socrates, for whom philosophy was not, and could not be, a discipline, Williams asked directly whether moral inquiry could make good on its aspirations. Ultimately, he concluded that it could not. Rather, it was better to find another way to achieve his aspiration. Williams’ alternative path sought to avoid the shackles of moral realism. The result was Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. An iconoclastic in temperament –​John McDowell (1986) described it as a ‘polemic against a theoretical aspiration for philosophical ethics’ –​Williams’ prime target is obligation and duty-​based conceptions of ethical thought that are unconditionally binding due to their objective grounding, which, while ‘not an invention of philosophers’, is nevertheless reinforced by a particular kind of philosophical thought (2006a, 174). As Williams writes, ‘many philosophical mistakes are woven into morality’ (2006a, 196). For example, a derivative of moral reductionism is how objectively apparent obligations diminish the character and power of persons to act in a way that genuinely 59

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respects their moral powers, judgement and integrity. Williams directs his scepticism towards the purported authority of Kantian, utilitarian and Aristotelian ethical theory, and finds these traditions unsatisfactory. The key criterion for Williams’ ethical theory was that it must be practical. By this he meant that it must have a chance of being used in lay settings, and that it must have a chance of being attainable. This does not mean he licensed negative ethical theories, that is, theories that reject the idea of correctness or incorrectness of thought, either. Williams is clear that such a negative theory is an error. Rather, his scepticism deals with the prospect that philosophy might be able to substantially aid ethics (2006a, 74). He is thus optimistic that ethical life is possible while retaining commitments to the values of truth, truthfulness and individualism. However, he does qualify this with an insistence on the irreducible plurality of virtues and the inevitability of insoluble dilemmas. In this respect, like rhetoric, the field of ethics stands adjacent to philosophy; it is more poetic than logical. There can be no transparent application of rationality; the good is not something that we deduce from first principles –​this is simply unrealistic. The good is rather the stuff of judgements, and we can be persuaded by good reasons and sentiments. Here, the goal should not be for an ambitious universal deduction of an externally valid foundational principle, along lines suggested by Parfit, but rather an attitude to practically build a social order. In doing this, Williams’ primary contribution was, in my view, to help shift moral and ethical thought from the logic of utility to practised beliefs. In other words, morality should be based within human capabilities; there must be practical reasons for agents to explain their actions and aspirations. The implication is that a person must believe the reasons they advance to justify their attributions, or morality should be based on reasons that a person could be persuaded by if presented with sound reasoning. This is a view of morality based upon internal reasons. The important intellectual move achieved by Williams is the displacement of rationality itself as a source of authority over life and ethics. There is a worry that the presence and unknown extent of indeterminacy may mean that moral judgements become wholly determined by external factors. As Kant wrote, ‘if all worth were conditional, and hence contingent, then for reason no supreme practical principle could be found at all’ (Kant 2012, 41). The predicament is not just that persons themselves and values respond to contingent factors, but rather that they are both deeply formed by contingency. With the weight of the example in mind Thomas Nagel provides a scenario: Someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany. And someone who led a quiet and harmless life in Argentina 60

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might have become an officer in a concentration camp if he had not left Germany for business reasons in 1930. (Nagel 1993, 58–​9) By putting it in such stark terms, Nagel offers an illustration of the implications of this predicament by suggesting that circumstances of birth affect subsequent ethical judgements and assessments. In other words, each of us could quite easily have been otherwise, at least with respect to our circumstances and situation. Beyond place of birth, there is also the lay acknowledgement that contingency is involved in our choices and courses of action. Several popular adages, like ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’, acknowledge that the unfolding of life seems to rest on the sensitivity of life to these contingencies. Admitting contingency appears to threaten ideas around agency and responsibility. If we follow this global scepticism, David Schmidtz writes, ‘even character, talent, and other internal features that constitute us as persons are arbitrary so long as they are products of claims of events containing arbitrary links. Every causal chain traces back to something arbitrary, namely the Big Bang. Therefore nothing is deserved’ (2006, 36). In effect, he says, the possibility of our being deserving, to take one example, ‘ended with the Big Bang’. Here, blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are meaningless and empty. It is a neat argument of sorts as it need not investigate the actual histories of particular people, since we know that due to contingency, questions of agency and responsibility are matters for law and politics, not pure moral reasoning. The belief that the contingency of persons has political implications is a view that can be found across the philosophical spectrum. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek says, ‘[a]‌good mind or a fine voice, a beautiful face or a skilful hand, and a ready wit or an attractive personality are in large measure as independent of a person’s efforts as the opportunities or experiences he has had’ (Hayek 1960, 94). While in A Theory of Justice Rawls writes: [O]‌ne of the fixed points of our considered judgements [is] that no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in any society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. (Rawls 1971, 104) But this seems counter-​intuitive as it undermines the partial attachments that inform sources of the self. As Michael Walzer asks, ‘how are we to conceive of [men and women] once we have come to view their capacities and achievements as accidental accessories, like hats and coats they just happen 61

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to be wearing? How, indeed, are they to conceive of themselves?’ (Walzer 1983, 260). Likewise, as Michael Sandel (2005) notes in several places, we are encumbered selves. The pursuit of projects and our situated intent play vital roles in our self-​conception. They are not mere incidentals, particularly if they are the result of deliberate cultivation. Due to his longstanding philosophical engagement with the problem of contingency, Williams advanced one of the most nuanced and subtle understandings of the problem, drawing attention to its implications in Morality (1972), Ethics and the Limits Philosophy (2006a) and Shame and Necessity (1993b). His work offers rich intellectual resources to think about this task. For this reason, I have chosen Williams to be an interlocutor to address the problem while advancing the case that despite contingency there remains sufficient justification for normative claim-​making. Accordingly, while luck is not benign (it certainly matters and it should be recognized that it matters), its involvement in sequences, actual or possible, does not scuttle or diminish normative claims.

Williams and contingency Motivating Williams’ project was his suspicion that supreme moral principles did not exist. By this he meant that supreme moral principles had little authority. Indeed, he believed that we ‘would be better off without it’ (Williams 2006a, 174). Consequently, Williams was wary of any system that claimed as much. In holding this position, he rejected transcendental accounts of deontological ethics. Rather than being motivated by a kind of naturalism, John Cottingham proposes that this rejection ‘seems instead to be a kind of resigned acquiescence, an acceptance that we have come to rest content in the prospect of a life grounded in no more than how things merely are’ (Cottingham 2008, 35). If Cottingham is correct, there exists a certain ethical pessimism in Williams’ work, one that directs itself at the supposed comfort that universal moral systems provide irrespective of whether they are based on theology, a set of propositional connections between the self and the cosmos, or even an understanding of objective reality. Instead, Williams says that we should sober up and confront things as they are. One must ‘[refuse] to present human beings [as] ideally in harmony with their world’ (1993b, 164). Additionally, he found ordinary moral practices wanting. They were ‘empty and boring’ (1972, 9), holdovers which required significant reformation if they were to aid authentic human flourishing. Together, these points combine to argue for a proper, unvarnished understanding of historical and limited circumstances such that it will allow us to treat others in the manner that advances human flourishing. In Truth and Truthfulness, his last major work before his death in 2003, Williams sought to detail contingency and its implications. He wrote that 62

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‘radical contingency in our current ethical conceptions’ draws attention to how ‘they might have been different from what they are’ (2002, 20), and that once realized this becomes a disruptive force for the security of ethical thought and practice. The goal is to disturb us by pointing out that the ‘apparent contingency in our deepest beliefs and attitudes’ (Cottingham 2008, 24) are products of a particular historical development. Williams emphasized that contingency throws into question the ‘authority’ of morality. Although somewhat obscure, I understand his conception to refer to the reasons that we ought to act morally. If that is what Williams has in mind, then he seems to think that contingency undermines our confidence that we ought to act morally. Williams notes that such a conclusion is bitter-​sweet. In the one hand, it opens up possibilities to consider other moral and ethical arrangements, but on the other hand, it introduces uncertainty as to which other moral arrangements might be more suitable. It presents a conundrum whereby all action is possible but no single action is best. Williams provides three arguments to support his conclusion that it is best to set aside rational moral reasoning. These are that possible genuine alternatives exist, there remains the possibility of error and things could have been otherwise. All, in one way or another, address the history of moral philosophy and moral practice, including the creation of moral traditions. Williams’ first point in favour of contingency is that there are conceivable and real alternatives to existing ethical practices: we have knowledge of other societies and their ethical orders, conceptions and thought. But one does not have to turn to the past to see different ethical frameworks. A cursory view of local societies provides evidence that there is a plurality of possible conceptions of human flourishing. Further evidence comes from Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s research. They find that many ‘traditions’ are recent inventions, and the invoking of traditional status is an exercise to gain legitimacy for that practice (e.g. Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983). The same seems to hold for ethical or moral ‘traditions’. Thus, appeals to the continuity of a timeless tradition of universal reach appear suspect. Given this evidence, the conclusion is that all ethical systems have a local character, even those claiming otherwise. For this reason, one cannot adopt a ‘patronising’ attitude to past times and places; one cannot view them as ‘primitive’ or ‘obsolete’ (Williams 1993b, 10). The key insight, which is perhaps rather old hat now, is that ethics cannot easily be separated from the cultures which create them. As with all cultural practices, they might make sense to the participants, but when judged from a suitable distance may appear somewhat perplexing. Even ethics has implicit judgements (Williams 2006a, 129–​30). Those in favour of moral facts could respond by saying that common notions underlie each of these local ethical practices. In spite of apparent 63

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differences and manifestations, it is still conceivable to flesh out a set of ethical values that are endorsed by almost all ethical traditions. This claim has recently been made by Immanuel Wallerstein in European Universalism (2006) and by other common values proponents (e.g. Rachels 1986, 21–​2). While the idea of underlying convergence might appear seductive for its apparent inclusivity, Williams was doubtful. He held that such an idea was ‘not very likely to succeed’ because of ‘many and various forms of human excellence which will not all fit together into one harmonious whole’ (Williams 2006a, 153). Williams is correct in pointing out that value conflicts exist, and it is foolhardy to wish them away as some relativists and multiculturalists are prone to doing, or even suggest that enough dialogue and discourse ethics can foster solidarity and an appreciation of mutually exclusive differences. Williams’ second point is more direct. In effect, he asks, given our present judgements that other ethical systems are suspect, how certain can we be of our claims? The possibility for error means that all ethical claims must then be local in character. These are important insights, but ones that do not carry the day for contingency. Around us there are many different types of lives that we consider good and worthwhile pursuits. The belief that we all ought to focus on one monolithic ethical practice is akin to suggesting that we should all pursue a single profession. For obvious reasons this appears absurd. There can be a plurality of understandings of what constitutes a good life. Hence, the contingency seems banal. This does not provide licence to suggest that all pursuits are good and admirable. Instead, the friction between different moral systems seems to provide grounds to evaluate different conceptions of the good and assess what does indeed count as flourishing. This seems to provide support for the intuition that some ethical practices are preferable to others. Hence, the contingency seems banal. As Cottingham writes: Just as varieties of plant may be judged failures, because of susceptibility to disease, or limited tolerance to variations in climate or soil, so there are ethical systems that do not satisfactorily serve the needs of their members, or which may even exclude whole groups within society form the chance of developing their talents properly. (Cottingham 2008, 32) Indeed, by almost any criteria of authentic human flourishing apartheid South Africa illustrates how notions of ethical subjectivity or cultural relativism do not hold water. My point is that to suggest that ethics is a cultural product or project does not licence us to think that universal claims are impossible. Nor is it to suggest that all ethical projects are incommensurable. Things and ideas have a history. This inescapable truism should not undermine our 64

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confidence and commitment to a set of values and virtues. What ought to undermine our confidence and commitment is whether these values in fact do promote authentic human flourishing. My point here is that the values themselves count more than their historical nature. Contrary to Williams, my view is that the authority of morality comes from its tendency to promote human flourishing, not by being ahistorical. Besides, reflection affords the ability to separate out the ethics from the culture in which they reside. If this is the concern, the problem is not about contingency but error. That mistakes are made should not be a reason to abandon commitments, but rather a reason to keep our own fallibility in mind. Together, the earlier points are not so much about degrees of contingency and which values do or do not fit together, but rather that one has a clearer understanding of which criteria should be used to judge the success or failure of moral thought and practice. The third point in Williams’ argument seeks to advance radical ethical subjectivity. Williams agrees that chasing after a pure epistemologically guided ethics is limited by persons being intimately bound up with historical circumstances and descriptive understandings of the world. He notes that it is not the fact of having a historical path which is troubling, but rather the knowledge that that historical path could so easily have been otherwise. This is what Williams means when he points to ultimate contingency and the impossibility of ultimate meaning. Surely, Williams asks, ultimate contingency must provide anxiety. One might suggest that we can sidestep this anxiety by confining morality to responses, impressions and moral intuitions of the local worlds we inhabit. But this is not a satisfactory response, for if your inherited culture had been different, you would have different responses, impressions, moral intuitions and so on. For the sake of argument, let us grant the point that morals are in part encumbered rationalized intuitions tinted by culture. But even then, one still faces the problem of suggesting criteria to judge between the various moral intuitions and responses. Relying upon temperament is insufficient because it subordinates morality to appetite as opposed to reason, and an appetite can make no long-​lasting commitment. It is unwise, even foolish perhaps, to be satisfied with morality simply as the responses or acts named as moral or sacred. Pretending to be satisfied with such a closed and contingent universe seems like false bravado. While ethical subjectivists might embrace the apparent freedom that the recognition of contingency invites, there is an aspect which appears self-​defeating. Simon Critchley puts this succinctly: ‘At the moment of saying “God is dead, therefore I am”, it is utterly unclear in what the “I am” consists.’ He writes: ‘It is a mere leaf blown by the wind, a vapour, an ember, a bubble. The moment of the ego’s assertion, in swelling up to fill a universe without God, is also the point at which it shrinks to insignificance’ (Critichley 2005, 87). Other strategies 65

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for managing this problem include irony (pretending it does not matter), ethical quietism (a willed complacency in the face of facticity) and defiance (proudly maintaining that facticity does not matter.) Rather, in my view, it is better to show that contingency does not eviscerate the meaning of justice. The next two sections aim to pursue this avenue.

Extreme epistemic uncertainty How might our moral judgement about contingency alter if more sophisticated analytical methods were used, like the evaluation of outcomes in one world with outcomes in another nearby one. There are views that these kinds of tests might be able to precisely identify whether an outcome could have been otherwise, thereby circumventing some of the problems of contingency as they affect social life. To make this case, I selectively draw upon David Lewis’ conception of possible worlds and Duncan Pritchard’s conceptions of luck. Definitionally, Lewis thinks a world is ‘a maximal mereological sum of spatio-​temporally interrelated parts’ (Lewis 1985, 73). Keeping brevity in mind, I am agnostic as to whether Lewis’ modal realism necessitates the belief of cosmoi, that is, the infinite plurality of worlds causally and spatio-​temporally isolated from one another. The same holds for the ontological contents of these many worlds. This also means I am setting aside the question of whether knowledge requires causal interaction. The same is true with the astonishing cost of believing that these worlds exist. My interest is rather to apply the methods used to think about these worlds and their contents to highlight the extent and scope of brute luck within our world. In this respect, I think possible worlds are an abstraction that provides ‘a philosopher’s paradise’ (Lewis 1985) but does not have much utility beyond this. Pritchard’s conception of luck takes these worlds into account and focuses on those that are most nearby. With this in mind, for Pritchard, luck is ‘an event which obtains in the actual world but which does not obtain in a wide class of nearby possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for this event are the same as in the actual world (where I continue to buy a lottery ticket, the lottery remains free and fair and with long odds, and so forth)’ (Pritchard 2007, 279). Pritchard’s method is to contrast the outcome of events that have occurred to those that would most likely have occurred in nearby possible worlds. A method of this sort is likely to be dismissed by luck sceptics as excessively abstract and vague, but such a conclusion is premature. To bring some life to the conception, Prichard points to the example of a skilled archer ‘in good environmental conditions and in tip-​top mental and physical condition’ (Pritchard 2007, 279). The skilled archer would likely hit the target in the actual world and would most likely hit the target 66

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in almost all of the nearby possible worlds in which the initial conditions were similar. Thus, the outcome cannot be a result of pure luck but rather one of skill. Contrast this outcome to an unskilled archer: a person who has never held a bow before, let alone received archery training. Given the same conditions as before, it is unlikely that the unskilled archer would hit the target in the actual world and in most nearby possible worlds. But if she did happen to hit the target, it is likely that we would attribute this outcome to good luck. Conversely, if the unskilled archer lost control of the bow and fired it into the air with such an arc that it managed to clear the range and hit someone, we would likely say that such a bad outcome would not have occurred in nearby possible worlds, so we would say that this is a case of bad luck. For Pritchard, the key lies in the relevant initial conditions, the extent of deviation of outcome and the singularity of outcome of the event in question: he defines a ‘lucky event’ as an event that ‘obtains in the actual world but does not obtain in a wide class of nearby possible worlds in which the relevant initial conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world’ (Pritchard 2007, 280). Granted, there are things that Pritchard does not sufficiently specify, but it is a good start. For instance, there are questions regarding how nearby worlds happen to be and to what degree and in what respect they differ. Additionally, he does not attend to the relationship between intent and luck. To make this clearer, let us reconsider the case of the unskilled archer. She had the intent to hit the target but not necessarily the skill to do so. The point is that having intentions does not exclude the possibility of luck. The issue of intention raises the spectre of desert. Desert theorists have occasionally downplayed the extent to which contingent features scuttle desert by proposing that desert makers are relations between outcomes and the internal features of persons or objects and that one need not assume anything about what caused those features. The classic tripartite desert base proposed by Joel Feinberg in Doing and Deserving is ‘P deserves X by virtue of feature F’. For example, he suggests: ‘Art objects deserve admiration; problems deserve careful consideration; bills of legislation deserve to be passed’ (Feinberg 1970, 55). These claims suggest nothing about the history of those features. These proponents question why we say history matters for persons and not for objects. Nothing has changed, they say, only the stakes. Here desert comes through by appreciating what those internal features are, irrespective of how they came about, and not from evidence that these features could have been otherwise. Some desert theorists take this a step further, claiming that the classic tripartite base does not include a temporal qualification (Schmidtz 2006). So they do not see a problem with providing Ada with an archery scholarship instead of Bill, because she shows more promise than Bill, and may one 67

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day be better than him. As much as this judgement is questionable, it is the kind of practical judgement people make daily. By contrast, in my view there is something odd about this argument. It forgets that things deserve acknowledgement precisely because we know their history, intent and purpose. In other words, we know their social role. Naïve desert theory, as I presented earlier, reifies things and persons, disembedding them from their social history and relationships, and thus hampering the kinds of desert goals for which they nominally advocate. Moreover, as I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, desert is extremely vulnerable to contingency. I maintain that brute luck differs from the horizon of expectation that arises when one introduces perception of luck into the mix. To circumvent this issue, it is useful to make a distinction between agent-​relative reasons and agent-​neutral reasons. Agent-​relative reasons turn on perception, detection and the comprehensiveness which is the ability to give reasons for things that are known, but which itself is based upon the capacity and capability to give and take reasons and to weigh evidence. Agent-​neutral reasons have none of these features. What I mean by this can roughly be conveyed using John Searle’s distinction between ‘features of reality’ (2007, 82) that are observer independent and those that are observer dependent. For Searle, a ‘rough test for whether a feature is observer independent is whether it could have existed if there had never been any conscious agents in the world’ (2007, 82). Therefore, the existence of the observer-​dependent feature is that the attitudes, thoughts and intentions are of active conscious agents. Examples of this kind of feature of reality include marriage and language. Alternatively, observer-​independent features include photosynthesis and cell division. Social worlds consist of both features. The question is to what extent is luck an appropriately observer-​dependent consequence of observer-​ independent sequences. Pritchard would have us believe that luck is an observer-​independent feature of reality, that is, the observer’s opinions of the matter do little to influence the assessments of the degree of luck involved in a particular outcome. Yet, we need to recognize that this notion appears to be counter-​ intuitive. Surely, many people would say that luck is observer dependent insofar as we subjectively constitute luck through the application of language to make an event intelligible. I think Pritchard is correct on this point, and that a good portion of the usage of luck is in error. If this reasoning is correct, then luck has little to do with intent or usage. This poses a problem for accounts of justice insofar as we keep intent at the foreground of our minds. At issue here is whether one can ascertain the totality of knowledge about the case and relevant facts about the local circumstances to be able to assess what is, or is not, luck. This is to say that regardless of our intent and regardless of the degree of awareness that the events in question could have turned out differently, luck ultimately rests upon probabilistic causal processes. 68

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Let me explain by turning to some of Harry Frankfurt’s philosophy (1969). One of his key contributions was to highlight the distinction that some conditions of responsibility are conditions on the actual sequence of causes leading up to an action. This is known as the ‘regression requirement’. It means that to be responsible for something, you must be responsible for its causes. Applied recursively, regression requires that responsibility reach back through the actual sequences of causes. Other conditions for responsibility instead concern what might have happened in other possible sequences of events. This is known as the ‘ability to do otherwise requirement’. Reasoning, selecting and acting in and between various courses of actions determine the load of responsibility a person would bear. Some courses of action have a heavier load of responsibility. Others do not. If you could not do otherwise then a level of coercion has forced your available course of actions, thereby diminishing your ability to reason and select. Applied in a conventional compatibilist framework, this requirement says that you could have the ability to do otherwise if you had been otherwise. Frankfurt’s essential insight was that responsibility turns on the character of the actual sequence of events leading up to an act, not on the possibility of alternative sequences. This opens the possibility that determinism may be compatible with responsibility even if it is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise. Frankfurt claims that the fact that a person could not have done otherwise is irrelevant to our judgement of the degree of responsibility they carry for what they do or did. What matters is the actual sequence of events leading to the act; not that possible alternative sequences exist, or that there are possible other outcomes. In Frankfurt’s Black–​Jones case, the outcome would have occurred irrespective, but the key distinction is whether Jones, for reasons of his own, pursues a course of action, or whether Black, for reasons of his own, was able to create the circumstance which caused Jones to act in a certain way. What matters for judgements about responsibility is the reasons for acting and how they were arrived at, not the outcome. Frankfurt maintains that it is possible to make judgements about responsibility even if no other course of action was possible. So contingency does not make it the case that we have no agency or responsibility. Still, are there better ways perhaps to address the problem of contingency and its effects on social life?

Fortitude, wisdom, responsibility and self-​affirmation Notoriously, Richard Rorty renounced the promise of the analytic method because of anxiety born from confronting contingency. In his introduction to The Linguistic Turn (1967), he maintained that analytic attention would solve or dissolve philosophical problems ‘either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use’. However, by the time he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty (1979) had 69

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conceded that the contingent nature of language meant that no foundational claim or set of commitments could stand untouched by contingency. He took the fragility of linguistic foundations to be globally applicable. Thus, contingency implies that persons are bound by epistemic uncertainties of one kind or another. The difficulty, as I showed earlier, is that contingency can appear like an abyss that offers little in the way of judgement beyond any local case at hand. Lacking a supreme principle, as Kant might say, there can be no clear course of right action. However, Rorty believed that such a stance is itself a poor move. He wanted to acknowledge the presence of contingency while nevertheless reclaiming space for normative evaluation. For this reason, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty (1989) proposes that we become liberal ironists; that is, persons who acknowledge that convictions are contingent, but that contingency need not lessen our commitment to them, provided that these commitments are well justified. Rorty ran together a pragmatist epistemology with pragmatist politics. What I mean by this is that he found his practical adequate foundations in the liberal tradition of Dewey and James. This is a form of liberalism that is metaphysical as well as deeply concerned with actual persons. The liberal ironist intended to defend the values, goods and rights of liberal democracy in a project of a critical refinement to shore it up as opposed to gleefully pulling it down. In applying this blend to Rawls, Rorty determines that liberal societies create ‘new moralities’. What he means is that liberalism offers a social imaginary of public life’s ultimate concern. This need not be a religious or a political theology in the strict sense, but rather a rendering of metaphysical axioms that set humans in relation to their experience and condition, giving them due and proper attention. The liberal projecy seeks to create and propel an authentic political subject into the world to fashion it in a particular way. Competition and antagonism between different political philosophies rest, ultimately, on selections and beliefs in different metaphysical axioms. Logical and consistent extrapolation and derivation from these base commitments thus populate the content of different political philosophies, some which may be compatible with others on any given point, but some which might not be. While logic may help clarify and adjudicate between different sets of commitments, and rhetorical rearticulation may make people satisfied by certain outcomes, there is nevertheless conflict on the reason and justification for that outcome. Hence, there is little that appeals to objective truth or impartial reason can do to settle some disputes. There is a degree of metaphysical incommensurability. So, while there are irreconcilable disputes over goods, practically, for peace and order to be possible, it is better to manage these disputed goods through politics than partake in moral reasoning 70

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about the suitability of values. Effectively, plural conceptions of the good life allow people of different moral persuasions and political inclination to acknowledge one another’s public relevance. It is issues like these that motivated Rawls to turn towards a political liberalism which downplayed metaphysical considerations to reorient public reasoning towards more practical, tangible objectives. It is in facing this intractable dilemma that persons have to rely upon their ability to make suitable judgements to either engage or disengage with particular problems rather than with the consequences that stem from that decision. To aid in this decision, persons can develop and use wisdom. Wisdom offers a way to cope with, and respond to, the actions and events we find ourselves involved in, and for which we could do little to prepare. From Robert Nozick’s perspective, wisdom is a more important virtue than simply ‘knowing fundamental truths’. Wisdom is the ability to apply these fundamental truths where relevant, to connect them ‘with the guidance of life or with a perspective on its meaning’; it is also ‘what you need to know in order to live well’ (Nozick 1989, 269, 268). Sometimes a person does not need to know fundamental truths to live well, or to be good. Similarly, wisdom is attentive to advancing and safeguarding well-​being and human flourishing. Nozick points out that ‘[w]‌isdom’s special penchant for limits seems arbitrarily to favor conservatives over radicals’, but asks ‘why is contracting the domain of feasibility any wiser than expanding it?’ (Nozick 1989, 271). The point is that one would be mistaken in presuming that cultivating this virtue leads to any one political affiliation. In this respect, being wise attends to what is common to everyone’s life, what can help the general well-​being or ‘what is common to all of our lives about what (we judge) it is important for every human life to be concerned with’ (Nozick 1989, 272–​3). For this reason, wisdom needs to be lived and practised. A person who knows this but did not live accordingly would not be considered wise. So wisdom involves possessing a type of knowledge as well as the demonstration of that knowledge by living a particular kind of life and making decisions in a particular kind of way. The prime benefit of wisdom is that it helps a person discern the importance of thought, word and deed. ‘It is practical’, Nozick writes; it helps humans ‘cope with the central problems and avoid the dangers in the predicaments(s) human beings find themselves in’ (1989, 268) by putting things into due proportion and due relation, that is, a due perspective with the things that people encounter in their everyday lives. Here it has to do with ranking and weight, attention and consequence. There are several benefits for favouring wisdom over fundamental truth. First, as Nozick points out, contrary to the categorial nature of truth, wisdom involves degrees. So, while confident approximations, when they do appear, are not truths, they can be suitable for the task at hand. Second, 71

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wisdom can be demarcated. There exist areas over which a person can be wise. For instance, I can be wise about cricket but foolish with finances. In short, a person can have wisdom in one area but not another. Demarcation can accommodate contingency, for even if I were otherwise, there is still the possibility that I could possess wisdom of another kind. Wisdom is less stressed by contingency. Third, the value of wisdom is not predicated upon successful endeavours. ‘Wisdom does not guarantee success in achieving life’s important goals’, Nozick writes, ‘just as a high probability does not guarantee truth’ (1989, 270). If we combine our knowledge that some virtues, like generosity, require good luck, and that some outcomes are subject to luck, then the value of wisdom is that it is not constrained by either. I can still be wise even if the outcome I intended did not arise due to bad luck. Further, being wise does not require good luck. It simply requires a reasonable attentiveness to the world and to life. So while wisdom is susceptible to contingency, a wise person seeks to accommodate that contingency as practically as it can. Regarding the interplay between luck, fortune and the ability to be virtuous, there are few better accounts than that provided by Martha Nussbaum (2001) in her magnificent book, The Fragility of Goodness. She identifies and clarifies the disarmingly simple but necessary question of whether the good should be resilient and immune to unfortunate circumstances; or whether it is permissible, acceptable even, that the good is vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. Insofar as it is relevant, this relates back to the question of whether, despite contingency, the good is still a viable goal to pursue. That is, is it an unachievable aspiration? She presents Plato and Aristotle as taking two opposing stances on conduct in the face of luck and fortune. Whereas the tragic style exemplified by pre-​Socratics such as Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer gave dramatic form to the vulnerability of human goodness to external events, Nussbaum presents Plato as holding that the good, while not being immune to luck, can be safeguarded from contingencies by bunkering down in knowledge, truth and certainty. Nussbaum’s Plato’s good does not turn on, or succumb to, contingencies, but rather is an internal property of the person themselves. This is consistent with Plato’s wider philosophy insofar as Platonic forms are free of contingent relations. By contrast, Nussbaum presents Plato as being much more open to the practicalities of life, holding that the involvement of contingencies need not be reason to scuttle the good. In this sense, Nussbaum’s Aristotle is less demanding, and more prepared to accommodate actual human conduct and lived experience. These two approaches are radically dissimilar orientations to moral conduct and are split over their respective stances on perfectionism. Woodruff neatly sums up this difference: ‘whereas Nussbaum’s Plato sees human limitations as a curse to be overcome, Nussbaum’s Aristotle sees them as a challenge and an opportunity for specifically human virtues that are not available to 72

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perfect beings passim’ (1989, 206). An additional difference is that ‘Plato thinks that virtue and happiness depend on the control of the passions, Aristotle on education and the proper use of passion’ (Woodruff 1989, 210). In this fashion, there are different conceptions and expectations, purposes and aspirations, over the practice of philosophy itself. It is not important whether Nussbaum’s Plato and Aristotle are congruent with the actual lived Plato and Aristotle. Rather, we should treat Nussbaum’s Plato and Aristotle as descriptions of two distinct arguments over whether goodness should be immune to bad luck, ill-​fortune or unforeseeable conflicts between values, virtues, goals or projects that are individually compelling but jointly inconsistent in a political system. Furthermore, do we lament these value conflicts and seek to reconcile them, or do we accept them as being always already irreconcilable aspects of the human condition, the gap between actuality and potentiality? These are relevant sorts of conflict that stem from our projects and commitments. Moreover, there is a degree of difficulty in trying to capture, attend to, represent or reconcile them using reason alone. At times, the concurrent values clash and we cannot satisfy our desires and motives to reconcile them. Despite the contingent elements of our human conduct, and the pending dangers of luck, goodness remains possible. Moreover, despite there being differences, these differences matter, because they affect our outlook in various ways. As a rider to the earlier point, one should be aware that luck and contingency can undermine goodness in similar ways. For example, Nussbaum’s Aristotle points out that the virtue of being generous depends upon you having the means to be generous. In short, I can only demonstrate some acts of virtue if I happen to be in the right circumstances, many of which are themselves not fully of my own making. In this case, justice as a virtue depends upon there being the means to achieve a just set of relations. The conclusion seems to be that virtues do not reflect intention as much as they do opportunity. Virtues are also subject to contingency, and hence the good of virtue is a by-​product of circumstance. To be clear, this is not to say that there is no value in recognizing virtues as virtues, even if the resources required to cultivate virtues are distributed by brute luck: a kind and benevolent person is still kind and benevolent, even if she has those character traits because she was lucky enough to be raised by a loving middle-​ class family in a prosperous country. Rather, the point is that because virtues are too susceptible to contingency, they cannot anchor a theory of justice. There is a sense in which both good and bad luck feature in ethical life. I may be on the receiving end of bad luck that inhibits me from pursuing certain kinds of goods, or even from becoming good. Conversely, my cheery disposition could be soured by bad luck and I could become bitter. If so much contingency and luck are involved in achieving the good, it raises the question as to how the just set of relations that constitute the good are 73

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to be achieved. It is well known that Plato sought to head off the fallibility, and possible error of, subjectively defined goods by appealing to impartial experts, or to non-​contingent independent objective criteria of the good. But this is too stringent. Nussbaum’s Aristotle, on the other hand, offers a more reasonable guide to our attempts to pursue goods. This conception of justice is predicated upon the use of practical reasoning, which is, by nature, a human task, and hence allows itself to be vulnerable to contingencies.

Fallibility and fragility Let me tie these strands together. First, it seems that some actual sequences are only possible if brute luck is involved. Second, one can identify whether causal chains, sequences and outcomes are lucky by assessing whether it probably could have occurred in a nearby possible world. Third, I have suggested, identifying a lucky outcome does not exclude the possibility of intent. So luck need not absolutely scuttle desert claims, but when taking contingency into account everyone is lucky to some degree and in different ways. This is worth keeping at the forefront of our political mind when egalitarians assess how a person’s luck has contributed to their current circumstances, and then seek to ameliorate the burdens of bad brute luck and redistribute the processes of good brute luck. The virtue of this understanding of brute luck is that it nods towards the complex circumstances in which we find ourselves, attempts to aid human flourishing by respecting that persons have reasons for pursuing their projects and acknowledges the existence of persons who are accountable for the choices they make, but also that those choices are made under conditions not of their choosing. One potential objection could be to acknowledge that things could have been different, but to maintain that this should not detract from the possibility of desert. For instance, a runner in a race could have lost, but they did not. Because they could have lost, does that diminish the extent to which the runner deserves the medal? Are we to stipulate that only runners expected to win deserve medals? Such a criterion is nonsensical. Rather it is the other way around. Because the runner was prepared to use her capabilities and capacities in such a way as to place well, we give her just reward. Such an assessment respects the very core of her personhood: her conduct, projects and reasons. In qualified circumstances, this objection would hold that persons can deserve despite the presence of luck. Granted, the virtue of this version of desert nods towards the complex circumstances in which we find ourselves, attempts to aid human flourishing, respects that persons have reasons for pursuing their projects and acknowledges the existence of persons who are accountable for the choices they make. At the same time, however, this objection is vulnerable to contingency; everything is coloured by luck of one sort or another. 74

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The approach detailed in this chapter is not a resignation to the fates. Nor do I think it an appropriate response to declare that the fates have no bearing on the matter of justice. Rather, a suitable approach would be to come to a deeper appreciation of the nature and character of fate, luck and contingency such that we might be better positioned to know how to practically deal with them, respond to them or avoid them if they come to colour our projects. I think this is best served by cultivating the knowledge of how to use the truths that we discover or create to be able to deploy them in the appropriate fashion. This requires that we practise a complex tapestry comprising four key attributes: fortitude, wisdom, self-​affirmation and life. I have used Rorty and others to represent these points in more detail. This is fraught with epistemic uncertainty, but contingency and chance are not merely signs of human ignorance, they are ineradicable, pervasive features of the universe and show the limits of human cognition. Returning to Nussbaum (2001), her argument is that the value of the good in a person’s life comes from it being delicate, fragile and vulnerable. I take her to mean that it is unlikely people will be good to one another. It is unlikely that people will be wise. And it is unlikely that people will care for and about one another. Because these things are unlikely, there is a certain amount of awe due when they do occur. Nelson Mandela, after having been released from prison, adopting the public persona of reconciliation and forgiveness inspired this kind of awe precisely because his actions were unexpected by most observers. For this reason, we should appreciate good circumstances when they happen. The good is subject to chance, contingency and conflict, and it cannot be indefinitely isolated from these forces. We are now better positioned to directly confront Williams’ three charges. As to the point that possible alternatives exist, a person would welcome this knowledge because she comes to learn how this might help her project as it shows other courses of action are possible should the present course prove difficult to maintain. As to the possibility of error, a person accepts that this might be the case, and is therefore commensurably honest with her motivations, and willingly seeks out means to check her bearings. As to knowing that things could have been otherwise, a person need not let this cripple her, because those actions are past and unable to be changed; instead, she labours to make sure she can improve her present set of circumstances. Together, these attitudes allow the person to know how and when to make the appropriate moral judgement, and in this fashion, it is a virtue that requires constant practice. Considering the previous line of argumentation, let us now reconsider the nature of the good. As it stands, the good is virtuous because it is unlikely and unexpected. In Platonic hyperbolic perfectionism, the good is unbreakable and untarnished, but almost every person cannot be good in this way. To make the exception the basic standard of conduct is to diminish 75

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the large numbers of persons who are not positioned to do more, or who are simply average and cannot do more. It is ultimately an anti-​human approach that chastises the ordinary, and as soon as we chastise the ordinary, we are on a kind of moral eugenic track. Expecting people to be unbreakable is unreasonable. By demanding too much we might set persons up to fail, and in turn accelerate the breakage, discouraging them through consistent failure to meet unrealistic targets. This is a moral failure. For perfect creatures, ‘good’ is meaningless. Rather, imperfection makes the concept of ‘good’ meaningful, and ultimately colours our estimation thereof. With this in mind, we should not pressure people to be good, but rather help create circumstances where they act out of their own volition to do good; for what good is there if it is simply imposed? For these reasons, a practical assessment of good is one in which we should put stock. Acknowledging our fallibility and fragility does not lessen the goodness of moral commitments. At the same time, we must make do with what we have, hoping through reflection to refine our ideas and uncover pervasive error in beliefs and attitudes. The earnest desire to do so is at the core of the self-​critical project. The knowledge of error ought not to lead to paralysis or disengagement, but rather should provide simulative grounds for invigorative inquirywith the resources we have at our disposal. In sum, while practising virtues turns on contingency, this need not lead to despair. Granted, the presence of contingency may make attaining the good more difficult, or even unlikely in some cases, although it does not in principle overwhelmingly undercut it either. However, it does point to how societies seek to manage this feature of the universe. This is the topic to which I turn in the remaining chapters.

Making do with luck To end this chapter, let us return to Bernard Williams. Towards to the end of his life, in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006b), Williams thought we might be able to ‘make do’, that we could resolve contingency by merely saying that we have histories that could have been otherwise, but nevertheless we are encumbered and thus inherit certain intuitions. Still, these intuitions might be in error. Therefore we must be willing to adjust these intuitions when appropriate. At other times during his iconoclastic project, Williams suggested that we should be confident in the moral systems we have developed. Moreover, what worth are commitments if they are so easily discarded by taste, fashion and agility of judgement? I agree with these points. One needs to be sober in confronting things as they merely are, and to respond with a degree of confidence. But I do not think that these are enough. For one, I want confidence to stem from epistemological justification as opposed to tradition or convention. But 76

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beyond this, one needs to consider the fragility of our existing moral thought and human flourishing. It is quite easy for the conditions promoting human flourishing to be usurped. To turn to Cottingham again, he writes that ‘[t]‌he world is in no way hospitable to our activities or aspirations, as it were, temporality and purely by accident’(Cottingham 2008, 36). There is no guarantee of equality or liberty. These things require constant vigilance in the face of indifference. Knowing this must not undermine our confidence in pursuing ethical principles, prescriptions and allegiances, but rather ensure that one seeks to purposefully promote and sustain human flourishing. Such efforts speak to the value we place on ourselves in the wake of contingency. While he is correct, in my view, to dismiss the kind of rationality that is tied to institutions, Williams overlooks the value of reasonableness, and fails to entertain the notion that a person might be attracted to an ethical idea precisely because of its reasonable quality. Still, he opens substantive ethical reflection to public reasoning, for streamlining in ethical deliberation is not to be preferred over the availability of a wide range of alternatives. I wholeheartedly agree with this, particularly the optimism that such encounters can produce. Practice and navigation via public reasoning create space for substantive ethical reflection. Encounters with other persons evolve not out of obligation, but out of reason, with the interlocutors themselves being the source of reason. In other words, ethics are a result of a person’s judgements. In short, Williams thought that moral inquiry cannot come from external reasons but must be motivated by internal deliberation. The legacy of Williams’ argument lies in providing the foundation of the systematic study of the meaning of equality as a function of the recognition of personhood. Moreover, he showed how distribution should not only be thought of as a political or economic exercise, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a moral exercise. With Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams has probably come the closest to making good on Wittgenstein’s remark with which I began this chapter, about a book on ethics that exploded ‘all the other books in the world’.

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5

Accounting for Uncertain Opportunities Justice is influenced by happenstance. This is most apparent when one examines the case of moral luck. The problem has been succinctly put by Michael Clark. He explains: It is irrational to praise or blame people for what is not wholly within their control: ‘ought implies can’. But since our actions stem from our characters, circumstances and causal factors beyond our control, and their outcome is often unpredictable, luck appears to play a large part in determining our character and conduct, both of which we are morally accountable. (Clark 2007, 122) Bernard Williams describes this immunity principle as ‘basic to our ideas of morality’ (1993a, 36). However, when one considers contingency, this ‘basic’ belief becomes difficult to sustain. As argued in Chapter 4, there is a degree to which contingency is involved in the determination of moral judgements –​a person does not choose to be brought up in a particular culture, and there is only a certain point at which they may gain the ability to choose another life course, and even then, some of their basic traits, bodies and the like are inescapably encumbered by that experience. The self exists, and it is difficult to suggest that it is infinitely pliable or can be radically overhauled as some radical constructivists chant. ‘Our choices are constrained by causal factors not under our control’, Clark laments, ‘and the outcome of our actions is not always predictable’ (2007, 122). Moral luck has implications for the social formation of the person, not only from issues of civic ascription or self-​fashioning but also assessments of attributed agency. Using these as the main through themes, this chapter looks at how luck egalitarians have addressed a set of interrelated matters that involve partiality, acquired tastes and whether luck-​neutralization programmes would be too harmful to attachments, regardless of whether they are matters of chance. 78

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In short, it makes a moral and political difference in how we accommodate limitations that arise from uncertainty. In the remainder of this chapter, I look at how issues around rights, partiality and accountability test the luck-​neutralization impulse that is at the core of luck egalitarianism. To begin that exercise, given the extent to which Rawls draws upon the conception, I review Williams’ arguments on equality, counterposing them to Nozick’s outright rejection of the egalitarian terms of reference. This is to show the limits of both liberal and conservative critiques of equality as well as open the door to assess whether Marxian conceptions of equality might have more merit.

Moral luck and responsibility The problem of moral luck is often associated with Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. Though they emphasize different features for different reasons –​ Williams sought to undermine the Kantian conception of morality, while Nagel wanted to demonstrate the trap between intuitions and facts –​both argue that we should bite the bullet and acknowledge that luck is involved in moral determinations, and that it is practically impossible to base moral judgement solely upon pure rationality. It is a truism that people are quite aware that luck plays a role in life: that one person’s success can be as much influenced by luck as another person’s misfortune. But persons tend to hold, like Kant, that luck should not matter to moral worth; that morality should be immune to luck; that luck should not make one a better person. This version of morality, Williams wrote, offers ‘solace to a sense of the world’s unfairness’ (1993a, 36). But, if luck does matter, then that solace evaporates. On these grounds, Williams argued that we should not presuppose an obligatory general ‘right way to do things’, but rather that the ‘right way’ must take into consideration the complexity of life itself. In support of his argument against reductive moral reasoning, Williams introduces a thought experiment drawing upon the life of the painter Paul Gauguin (1848–​1903). To fulfil his ambition of becoming a great painter, Gauguin believes that he must abandon his family to poverty and move to French Polynesia. Success then followed. As there is no way to know in advance if Gauguin will succeed, Williams suggests that the evaluation of Gauguin’s decision depends on the eventual outcome of that decision: ‘the only thing that will justify his choice will be success itself ’ (Williams 1993a, 38). Nonetheless, as Williams grants, Gauguin’s success depends on luck, so our assessment of the outcome is susceptible to things beyond a person’s control. Williams believes that our moral assessments of whether Gauguin was a complete scoundrel or a genius who made difficult decisions to advance his art is undoubtedly coloured by ‘how things turned out’. 79

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Accordingly, Williams distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic luck. Extrinsic luck concerns factors outside of elements of the project, whereas intrinsic luck concerns factors inside elements of the project. For example, Gauguin sets in motion intrinsic luck because he initiates the action. If he becomes a bad painter because of his move to the South Sea Islands, then this is a case of bad intrinsic luck, because he did not know the outcome of the trip. The contrary also holds. Gauguin is thus partially responsible for the resultant luck, good or bad, because he initiated the sequence. By contrast, extrinsic luck is the unforeseen occurrences that happen to Gauguin. For example, if the ship that took him to the island had sunk before it reached French Polynesia. While these arguments are certainly insightful and productive, Williams’ overall discussion contains several errors, I believe. For brevity, I am going to set aside some of these and instead focus on his conclusion that due to the inseparable role of luck, morality cannot be the supreme value. Williams argues that regardless of the system of moral reasoning, the moral judgements they reach are little more than post hoc revision and retrospection, itself subject to epistemic luck. He counters-​proposes that what matters when assessing a person’s actions is what information was available to them at the time of deciding, not what they learned after the fact, or on ‘how things turned out’. From this perspective, the basic assessments of Gauguin’s actions would be that, irrespective of whether his project succeeded because of internal or external luck, it was at the expense of his family. Nagel’s version of the problem of moral luck emphasizes a different set of concerns. Like Williams, the general area of concern involves practical reasoning, but he casts it as a conflict between moral practice and moral intuition. To expand, Nagel calls the Kantian intuition the ‘responsibility assumption’, where ‘people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control’ (1993, 58). But the actual practice of moral judgement often does not meet this basic criterion insofar as people are often judged based on things that are not within their control. For Nagel, the problem is not that we make mistakes in moral judgements, but rather that luck influences our judgements, and hence poses a fundamental problem to the conception of moral responsibility (Nagel 1993, 58). He distinguishes between a driver who deliberately passes through a red traffic light and narrowly misses a pedestrian, and a driver who deliberately passes through a red traffic light but hits and kills a pedestrian. Both drivers did the same thing, and are responsible, but nonetheless they are judged to be reckless or guilty of manslaughter, respectively. It seems that luck –​was the pedestrian a metre to the left or the right? –​makes a moral difference. In Nagel’s version of moral luck, the problem becomes one in which a person is judged –​blamed or praised –​for things that are beyond her 80

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control. It is fair to say that Nagel is more concerned with attribution than responsibility. His worry is not that people make mistakes –​for we could admit and rectify mistakes –​but rather that the human condition is one in which this type of mistake-​making is a given; further, rectification is difficult because mistakes are not under our rational control. Additionally, in his view, current notions of moral judgements are too simplistic given a finer grain account of how things are, hence they are fundamentally mistaken. Considering these factors, Nagel submits that there is ‘no solution’ (1993, 68). One can, like Nagel, despair at the problem and lose confidence in the validity of moral judgement. Or you can maintain the responsibility assumption but deny that these actions are outside one’s control. Another option is to reject the responsibility assumption, modify the conditions for judgements of responsibility or entirely reject responsibility-​based accounts. A fourth option would be to deny the intuition that luck makes a moral difference. Here, one could argue that we are mistaken in our view of moral luck: that epistemic luck is being construed as moral luck, that is, that luck places us in a better or worse position to know and assess a person’s moral standing. Lastly, one could reform the conditions for the judgement of responsibility to account for a partial admittance of luck. It seems to me that a better response is a combination of the last two options. Here one would acknowledge that much of what we assert as luck is rather a conventionally named reference resulting from an incomplete understanding of actions. In practical legal terms this would require, for example, that as there is no moral difference between the two drivers: they should be held responsible for their intentions, not the outcomes. Put another way, the drivers deserve to be held responsible for the actions they can intentionally control. This brings us to the edges of a discussion of how luck egalitarianism might be the most appropriate method for reconciling just deserts and equality.

Equality and fair shots at prospects Often, two claims about equality are misconstrued. The first is a descriptive claim that all persons are equal. The second is a normative claim that we should treat all persons as if they are equal. Williams suggests that opponents of egalitarianism misinterpret the meaning of the descriptive claim to dismiss the normative claim. Anti-​egalitarians point out the truism that persons possess differential skills, talents and endowments. But Williams does not grant that this truism scuttles the normative claim that people can be morally or politically equal. It would be ludicrous to suggest that a person’s skill as a cricketer grants them more moral or political consideration than someone who does not play cricket. It is a category mistake to allow non-​relevant inequalities in skills, talents and endowments to factor into considerations 81

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of their moral or political status. As the argument confusing the descriptive and the normative is mobilized by right-​wing egotists, so it becomes a trick to conflating different kinds of goods and dues. They mistakenly hold that the reason for medical treatment is the same as the reason for providing a gold medal to the fastest runner. Using Williams’ framework, it is possible to derive that when cases of differential treatment do arise, this treatment must be supported by relevant reasons, such as a fair trial for incarceration and the like, but that they nevertheless do not strip someone of their moral personhood. For example, while a person might be justly incarcerated for having committed a crime, such treatment does not diminish his or her moral status. Indeed, the state and community have a responsibility to treat that person fairly and in a way that preserves their moral standing. Unequal treatment must be justified and qualified, modest and minimal. If not, then that unequal treatment is unjustified and likely a form of domination. Just distribution is a process of giving persons what they are due in a manner that satisfies the requirements of justice at each point in this process. Just distribution is therefore a process undertaken in the spirit of justice as opposed to a series of steps, each of which meets simple procedural criteria. Persons can be, and are, due many items. Recent political theory yields the examples of Rawls’ primary and secondary goods, Macintyre’s goods of excellence and good of effectiveness, and Taylor’s mutual and convergent goods. These diverse categorization methods show dimensions, not distinction. So it is possible to have a good that is primary, effective and mutual. Williams argues that some goods should be distributed according to need, while others be distributed by merit. While Williams does not specify it, conceivably there are things distributed by desert, others by equality, and so on. In each case, a just distribution of a good depends on the type of thing to be distributed. The problem of just allocation is complicated by the many different goods persons are due and the many different distributional forms available. While one item distributed by one form may be just, the same item distributed by another form can be unjust. For example, a winner of a race may be due an acknowledgement for their achievement, but if all runners share in the same acknowledgement, the winner may rightly be annoyed that her achievement was not given its due. To explain why the runner’s annoyance is an appropriate response, Williams took it to be that items must be distributed according to their motivation for existence. What I understand Williams to mean is that the purpose of the item should match its form of distribution. For this reason, there is no inconsistency in maintaining that in a running competition medals should be awarded based on athletic achievement alone, while also stipulating that medical care should be distributed to people who need that care. As different types of items exist, so plural kinds 82

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of distributions can happily coexist. This reasoning attempts to overcome reductive conceptions of distribution by acknowledging the plurality of items and the plurality of claims. As Williams applies his case for need distribution, he points out that there is certainly inequality of merit. Some people simply do not merit certain distributions. For example, an Olympic gold medal is highly sought after, but there can only be one winner per event. This is a simple example, but Williams argues that the principle can be sustained in cases where there are multiple but limited goods, such as educational opportunities at prestigious institutions. This argument retains the element of competition over goods, and considers the scarcity of goods, but preserves the moral equality of persons. So despite not receiving certain educational privileges, I can be reassured that all is well on the moral front: other persons who do not merit such opportunities did not receive them either. One difficulty with the need distribution claim is the sociological fact that the rich do buy access to merit. If the best trumpets go to the best trumpet players, and the rich can afford trumpet lessons, it is likely that some of them will end up ‘meriting’ the trumpets. In this respect, ‘merit’ becomes tyrannical, as Michael Sandel (2020) has recently pointed out. Williams might counter that this injustice points to the need to give to the poor least they continue to lag the wealthy. Equality of opportunity, Williams writes, ‘requires not merely that there should be no exclusion from access on grounds other than those appropriate or rational for the good in question, but that the grounds considered appropriate for the good should themselves be such that people from all sections of society have an equal chance of satisfying them’ (1973, 244). In practice, even while I cannot play the trumpet, I can at least apply for a trumpet. And if there are more trumpets than applications, my need will be fulfilled. But if the ratio is reversed, then my need will be judged according to whether I will be best able to use this good. Admittedly, there is something intuitively appealing about equality of opportunity. On the one hand, it fosters the notion that if there was a fair shot the outcome could easily have been otherwise. If my interview was not successful, then I can say that the allocation was more arbitrary than some might otherwise think. ‘I had a good opportunity, but just missed out.’ Not much relief, but better than knowing that you were not even a contender for the job in the first place. On the other hand, equality of opportunity does not demand radical intervention, for most people can apply for goods. There is no prohibition on the student studying at an obscure inner-​city community college applying to attend Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, but her acceptance is less likely than a comparable student from, say, Princeton. The open-​door policy is little more than procedural showmanship. Recalling the opportunities afforded by wealth, capital and class, at this point there is value in distinguishing between genuine opportunities and faux opportunities 83

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where a person stands little or no chance of receiving the good. An example would be job interviews where the ideal candidate has already been selected. Effectively, equality of opportunity aids ambitions but not necessarily distributions; nor does it demand radical intervention, for most people can apply for goods. However, if genuine fair opportunities cannot be secured, then this calls for social reform. This is because the prospect of a fair shot is as important as the fair shot at the prospect.

Libertarian objections to equality Robert Nozick responded aggressively to Williams’ need distribution claims. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), he wrote that Williams’ argument is the best version of the argument for equality, but nevertheless equates Williams’ need distribution claims (‘The proper ground of the distribution of health care is health need. This is a necessary truth’ Williams, 1973, 240) with the statement, ‘[t]‌he proper ground of the distribution of barbering care is barbering need’ (Nozick 1974, 233–​4). This quick apparent refutation suggests that equality is not worth defending. In doing so, Nozick shows that his larger project involves arguing for the possibility that there can be criteria other than distributions according to need. As he understands it, claims about the right to satisfy needs, when backed by unfair uses of power, invade private property rights, effectively making those who have put their property to work subsidize those who are not as diligent (see Nozick 1974, 23). Effectively, what appears to be just, is on closer inspection a form of domination. In a more abstract fashion, Nozick is not convinced that all goods can be distributed according to their nature because people may disagree about the nature of the good. Along similar lines, if there is a prevailing belief about the nature and reasons for the social good, about using it in a way that brings about the most utility, might this not be an unreasonable limit on another person’s liberty to use an item as they see fit? Here, Nozick is appealing to the radical plurality of intention and purpose: that a barber can distribute their service according to need and profit seeking. While he makes a good point about plurality of intention, meaning multiple forms of distribution for any one product good, in my view, Nozick’s position represents a ‘libertarian conceit’; that is, the unashamed embrace of possessive individualism and the erroneous belief that one person’s success and another’s failure are disconnected. This is because the libertarian’s ultimate fantasy is that individuals can be disconnected from others. Furthermore, while some egalitarians can be preoccupied with consumptive outcomes and neglect the rights of the producer, for the most part egalitarians drawing from the Marxian tradition are much more focused on the rights of producers –​labour –​because they hold that the extraction of surplus value is a basic injustice. 84

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Nozick also has a very weak empirical and sociological conception of an actually existing capitalist political economy. If one considers the goods of society to be one big pie, he argues, then the contents do not matter, only that they are distributed equally. To demonstrate his point, Nozick suggests that at the beginning of the year, money is distributed equally. On 2 January, Wilt Chamberlain struck a bargain with a basketball team in which he will play for them in return for a portion of ticket revenues. Given his talents, many people come to watch him play and so Chamberlain becomes richer than others in society, surpassing his initial allotment. Nozick wants to know how this is unfair, given fair allotments, voluntary contracts and just transfer. But this line of reasoning does not hold up. Nozick ignores how many of Chamberlain’s attributes, such as height and stamina, contribute to his proclivity and talent to play basketball, let alone the moment in history that allowed Chamberlain to pursue his career in professional basketball. Indeed, by contingency, Chamberlain can claim no responsibility for his initial physical attributes. Part of the reason Chamberlain pursued practice and investment in sport was because his genetic endowment allowed him to have an edge in certain types of activities and to achieve the early success that underlies continued motivation to practice and further excel. Even here, Chamberlain’s early pathway to professional stardom was significantly influenced by chance encounters with people he met who gave him opportunities that were beyond the modest means of his working-​class parents. In other words, Chamberlain’s size, skill and commitment to training were not sufficient conditions on their own to propel him into a professional career. As Chapter 4 discussed, events that a person typically claims total responsibility for are influenced by radical contingencies associated both with the person’s proclivity for doing this activity and the social contexts in which they pursue the activity. But even then, although Chamberlain was more talented than his teammates, he was surrounded by all-​star players who enabled achievement. It hardly seems fair in a game where teams are necessarily more than the sum of their parts that these players, who supported his endeavours and allowed him to be the showcase talent, would not receive comparable proportions of the ticket prices. As Marx noted on several occasions, people come into society through the help of other persons. If we are to use Nozick’s own standard of evaluating ‘how things came about’, then his example of Wilt Chamberlain’s ‘just distribution’ is, at best, misleading. On the question of moral self-​ownership, Nozick holds that a person ‘owns’ their body and mind. He wishes to leverage this point to extend moral ownership over the products of just labour, and hence, much like someone’s quality of life is diminished by loss of sight, so too does appropriation of property, in his view, diminish quality of life. Some egalitarians acknowledge the sentiment of Nozick’s point and argue for a need for limits on 85

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appropriation even if there is no consensus on the precise nature of these limits or how they should best be determined. Another strategy has been to push back against Nozick’s presumptions and claim that he simply stipulates rather than proves moral self-​ownership. (‘At what point was the body unowned?’ ‘Can a person cede ownership of their body?’) Advocates of this line of reasoning claim that even if one concedes to Nozick’s moral self-​ownership argument, the resources required to sustain the body and life are common, such that these resources provide a means to deflate the self-​ reliance discourse that comes with self-​ownership, and hence open avenues for redistribution to promote genuine human flourishing (Cohen 1995). There are further difficulties with Nozick’s position when we acknowledge, via contingency, that people did not choose the bodies in which we exist –​ or, perhaps more importantly, the circumstances that may give some bodies more value than others. Those who have ‘better’ bodies, at a particular historical moment, due to some innovation in business or technology, have no grounds upon which to gloat and claim moral superiority. For example, the emergence of professional basketball in the United States in the mid-​ part of the 20th century created the possibility to valorize some bodily characteristics more than others, like height. Similarly, Wilt Chamberlain’s physical assets would not have led him to the same kinds of rewards in the 1920s that they did in the 1960s had there not been a rearrangement of racial prejudice. However, I think this discussion of moral self-​ownership distracts from more pressing concerns, as the concept does not have much traction outside a limited set of political libertarians, and even there the concept is rhetorically deployed in a manner that does not meet Nozick’s intent, to the extent that he gave up on political libertarianism in his later years as the chapter, ‘The Zigzag of Politics’ in The Examined Life (1989), demonstrates. In this chapter, Nozick acknowledges that personal freedom can sometimes be achieved via collectivist politics, and thus redistribution of some form is warranted. More broadly, conceptions of individuals’ rights have generally supplanted moral self-​ownership, so the better question is roughly: what are the minimal boundaries of a person’s rights, and can these be preserved under radical redistribution policies? In sum, we can acknowledge the moral rights of the producers while still providing them with the means to use their advantages to produce items. Considering the contingency of the person, however, producers themselves ought to acknowledge the extent to which their fortunes and talents are contingent. And they should keep in mind that in other kinds of societies with other kinds of economic structures they might not be able to use their talents. The inviolability of the person needs to acknowledge the contingency of the person. As I show in the remainder of this chapter, luck egalitarianism can propose and maintain a strong boundary of a person’s right. However, the 86

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concept of self-​ownership cannot provide a basis for political solidarity for it does not recognize duties beyond the self. Neither does it value humanity in general. This argument builds upon Rawls’ disagreement with Nozick. While not ignoring the motivations to produce, differential preferences or even accommodating incentives, Rawls argues that rights of production are subordinated to institutions which accord themselves with the principles of basic-​fundamental justice. Here the reconciliation is that it is unreasonable not to consider responsibility a key component of basic-​fundamental justice. But the responsibility sought needs to be of a genuine sort, not one coloured by contingency. This is a complication as it introduces multiple utilities and the production/​consumption divide, as well as acknowledgement that things are valued differently and cannot (nor should they) be measured on a common standard. Egalitarianism needs to encounter these problems, at least insofar as egalitarians themselves need to find a way to ‘balance the scales’.

Is the partiality of the rich reasonable? Acknowledging the rights of producers brings about a new problem: that being the issue of partiality. In Equality and Partiality, Thomas Nagel (1991) proposes that the grundbegriffe aspiration of any legitimate political system is the reconciliation of the partial and the impartial perspectives. Impartiality is a longstanding claim in justice, manifesting in principles such as treating like cases alike, coherence and integrity, to more modern conceptions such as the rule of law in the liberal state. Indeed, as Chapters 2 and 3 discussed, recognizing that others are alike –​that they share a moral psychology to use Rawls’ terms –​is a primitive requirement for extending justice to them, of trying to give them their due. By contrast, the partial perspective is the view from the self, given the self ’s distinctive interests, history and commitments –​what we summarily call their projects. The impartial perspective arises when one entertains the partial perspectives of others and acknowledges the weight and claims of their projects too. Due to our ability to consider both positions, Nagel writes, ‘we are simultaneously partial to ourselves, impartial among everyone, and respectful of everyone else’s partiality’ (1991). Emerging from these considerations are ‘two standpoints’, Nagel writes: ‘everyone’s life matters as much as his does, and his matters no more than anyone else’s’ (1991, 14). It is reasonable to conclude that these other partial views and their entailments are as important to these people as yours are to you; each person has their partial projects as do you. While partiality speaks to when and how we develop capacities, it also opens the space to acknowledge how one person’s actions and projects bear upon another person’s actions and projects. This is the dilemma; for practising an egalitarian politics can bring about impediments to the pursuit of equality valid independent projects. 87

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In other words, Nagel (1991, 5) says, we do not know how to do ‘justice to the equal importance of all persons, without making unacceptable demands on individuals’. The key point is not that our current situation may not be able to satisfy both conditions, but rather that no system could. And beyond any system there exists the real possibility that ‘we do not possess an acceptable political ideal’ to orient our political actions for equality. Equality itself may be inherently inconceivable because points of impartiality and partiality ‘pull in contrary directions’. Moreover, if the satisfaction of both elements is the key metric by which to judge the success of a political philosophy, then it seems unlikely that any can satisfy it. If this is the case, without a clear consistent orientation, a political system’s legitimacy defers to the broad acceptance of its consequences –​and in turn quickly degenerates into partisanship over who bears which consequences. As an example, Nagel considers the partial projects of the rich and the poor. Cohen, in commenting on Nagel’s argument, points out that there exists ‘a level [of money] so high that the poor would be unreasonable to demand it’ (Cohen 2011, 204). In fortunate circumstances these two demands might be close enough that a coherent ideal could be stated. But what of cases where the gap between the rich and the poor is quite considerable, like the statistics in Chapter 1 allude to? Or places like South Africa where the Gini coefficient, which measures income distribution, is so high that reasonable expectations are far enough apart that the rich have sufficient reason to resist the demands for sacrifice to help the poor while the poor are making unreasonably high demands of sacrifice for the rich. The apparent dilemma is that ‘the poor can refuse to accept a policy of gradual change, and the rich can refuse to accept a policy of revolutionary change, and neither of them is being unreasonable in this. The difference for each of the parties between the alternatives is just too great’ (Nagel 1991, 171). In effect, Nagel is arguing that in reasonable discussion it is unreasonable not to recognize irreconcilable reasonable disagreements; in other words, there are certain circumstances where there can be such a thing as asking too much, even of the poor. This argument helps preserve the status quo of extreme deprivation and inequality. However, in doing so he has left everyone blameless in wanting to secure their projects while the rich can pass at redistributing any portion of their wealth, wealth that was accumulated through the dispossession and exploitation of the very people asking for a reasonable redistribution. Are the rich, in fact, being reasonable in this example? Nagel reasons ‘that a strongly egalitarian society populated by reasonably normal people is difficult to imagine’ because any ‘standards of individual conduct which try to accommodate both [personal and impartial] reasons will be either too demanding in terms of the first or not demanding enough in terms of the second’ (1991, 49). G.A. Cohen described Nagel’s observation as ‘profound and unavoidable’ (2011, 205) for any advocate for a politics of 88

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redistribution. Indeed, Rawls felt the dilemma too, and it is evident in Political Liberalism (1993) that he no longer wishes to reconcile these perspectives through his proposal of justice as fairness; instead, he moves towards justice as the idea of an overlapping consensus. Be that as it may, I take issue with Nagel’s apparent dilemma not only because the implications are too dire and the prospects too dim for egalitarian aspirations, but because this approach turns persons into mere properties of a political calculus of ‘give and take’, as opposed to looking at what is sufficiently needed for projects to have a good chance of succeeding, and how others might be capable of making the products that could satisfy those needs. Nagel claims to have made the case that political systems (at least, a political system where the right has priority over the good) cannot cater towards securing equality. Removing justice from the orbit of the political system leaves it for institutions and persons to incorporate equality into their projects. If we are to put stock in Nagel’s argument, egalitarian justice concerns itself with the character and efficacy of institutions, not basic systematic arrangements. It seems as if the goal of Nagel’s political philosophy is to ‘make things better’, as opposed to revising the fundamental orientations of a society. Surely this gives too much credence to the status quo and avoids the important discussion of what constitutes fundamental political justice. Merely having a partial perspective is not adequate grounds to suggest that that perspective is right. One needs to offer more than that. One needs to justify that perspective. Moreover, we ought to demand more of a person’s partial perspective than the banal claim that it is theirs. A legitimate partial perspective stems from minimally well-​articulated and justified true beliefs corresponding to the best approximations of how things are, not partial sentiments wishfully making unchecked assertions. Is this not intellectual sleight of hand? As Nagel uses it: unanimous acceptability does not require the system to be truly acceptable, but rather that no one could reasonably reject it. The corollary implied that if one rejects a system on unreasonable grounds, then it can be said to enjoy legitimacy. But this construes workers, for instance, failing to voice their opposition to the current organization of the political economy, in part because that same system, through its everyday functions, has eroded these workers’ ability to acquire the skills and evidence needed to articulate a coherent and compelling counterargument, as a form of legitimacy. A criterion of voicing reasonable rejection favours those with the ability to reasonably articulate their rejections. And in a capitalist polity, this is typically those that use their wealth to hoard opportunities, then use that hoarding as a basis to claim that theydeserve to be heard before everyone else. As a further objection, one could point out the degree to which reasonability is a custom conditioned by social and cultural conditions. But, if reasonability is customary, it is difficult to see how it could be a bedrock for such a mighty claim that 89

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political systems cannot cater towards securing equality. Altogether, these are decisive oversights on Nagel’s part. Due to the nature of democratic societies, especially those that are a ‘permanent pluralism’, to use Rawls’ description, there will always be these gaps between ideas of equality and ideas of independence. But to let these gaps become barriers to egalitarian redress simply concedes to the kind of violence that gross social inequalities set in motion. The question is not between impartiality and partiality today; the question is the partiality of the rich today or the targeted violence they will certainly face tomorrow. As Sam Aluko (1999) has said, ‘the poor cannot sleep, because they are hungry, and the rich cannot sleep, because the poor are awake and hungry’. While Aluko was speaking about Nigeria, his insight applies to other places where social inequality has become a central characteristic of life, like the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western liberal capitalist states. I am not suggesting that Nagel offers no insights into the dilemmas and difficulties one faces when attempting to satisfy egalitarian justice. His is surely the best version of arguments that point to the difficulties that lie in reconciling liberty and equality, and it is certainly much more insightful than Nozick’s libertarianism. Still, Nagel’s version does not take adequate account of the degree to which equality can promote freedom from poverty and alienation, two of the most important targets in political thought. Equality decreases the constraints brought by inequalities, the types which hinder the fulfilment of partial objectives. In this variation, equality does not hinder partial projects, but rather is something that advances them. But then again, to modify a line from Nagel, maybe projects aren’t everything.

The costs of acquired tastes The line of agreement that I presented and developed in the preceding sections and chapters suggests that egalitarian aspirations can best come through sensitivity to the complexities that underlie the production, circulation, and consumption of life chances, that is, the political economy of social inequality. Equality is, in part, making provisions for those who need it, whatever that need happens to be, and whoever it happens to be, with what you happen to have. Need is not a priori specified. Failure to qualify for egalitarian justice does not preclude other types of dues. This also allows us to entertain ideas about priority and sufficiency that let them sit beside egalitarianism. Rawls’ difference principle is the quintessential example of where the claims of the worst off must always be given priority. Sufficiency specifies a level of allocation that is enough. Roger Crisp (2003) is a strong advocate for this principle, suggesting we should redistribute until a person’s welfare needs are met. This view is defended in that we care less about inequality differentials and more about welfare. For example, the 90

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Table 5.1: A taxonomy of policies affecting inequality State of public policy intervention Pre-​production Aspect of Bottom Endowment policies inequality (health care, education); being universal basic income targeted Middle Public spending on higher education Top

Production

Post-​production

Increase minimum wage; job guarantees

Social transfers; full-​employment macro-​policies

Industrial relations and Social welfare labour rights; sector wage nets; social boards; worker cooperatives insurance

Inheritance and estate Regulations; anti-​ taxes monopoly laws

Wealth taxes

Source: Adapted from Blanchard, Olivier, and Dani Rodrik, eds., Combating Inequality, Table 0.1, © 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Peterson Institute for International Economics, by permission of The MIT Press.

inequality between the rich and the super-​rich is less of a concern than securing a decent minimum level of welfare. This decent minimum welfare is to be provided to people despite the reasons for their need, whether that need can be said to result from the systematically unfair allocation of taxation policies or because of a person’s own poor choices. This view is often cashed out in policy as a minimum wage or basic income grants (see Table 5.1). This conception has merit insofar as it restricts itself from stipulating the good. A person can be given a certain amount to pursue his or her own projects. Still, I suspect that some egalitarians would be sympathetic, but not satisfied, with the provision of sufficient resources to enable a person’s choices, especially when political determinations of sufficiency can become a means to deny persons their equal due in a prosperous society. As an alternative conception of sufficiency, it might be better to reframe the notion of a threshold of resources required to pursue projects as the political means to dramatically subvert the political consequences born by wide inequalities of wealth, thereby preventing social inequality from becoming political inequality. As it applies to a health system, for example, this would mean that there should be public health insurance provided unconditionally at the point of service. US private health insurance seeks to profit from the commodification of illness; and typically, it does not cover people who have unknown or unknowable underlying health risks; at times they even deny claims when a known pre-​existing health condition is exacerbated. This is not the point to recover the ground of decommodifying health care through spreading the costs over the entire population. However, if we recall Williams’ need distribution principle from the beginning of this chapter, arguably it is just that equally resourced public health insurance should be distributed according to need, and that as all people need a health policy, it provides at 91

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least some minimally sufficient equality. Through state revenues, this kind of system can meet Marx’s adage, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There are, however, some moral philosophers that point to abuses of social goods, like decommodified health. They raise good objections that certain deliberate courses of action may in fact greatly undermine the social good, and in fact compromise it for others given facts of scarcity. A basic example might be a smoker who later in life takes up a hospital bed, a bed that could be used for someone less ill, but who did not smoke. It is this general problem Ronald Dworkin (1985) sought to tackle when distinguishing between equality of welfare and equality of resources. To put it differently, there are consequences to preference and tastes as they greatly shape the politics of equality. Presenting Dworkin’s argument requires some preliminary ground clearing. For him, welfare is generally understood to refer to the internal state of agents. This is variously expressed as happiness or preference satisfaction. Resources refer to things external to agents. Initially, equality of welfare appears attractive; it seeks to equalize relative well-​being, hoping in this way to promote human flourishing while respecting value pluralism. This is because different things and pursuits differently affect a person’s well-​being. This is one way to specify an equal condition without stipulating the precise contents of such a condition, akin to the priority of the right but with an egalitarian twist. In Rawls’ basic structure, it would mean improving those least advantaged to achieve their desired well-​being. Other benefits of this position include the emphasis on what matters to a person and how well they fare. In contrast, equality of resources is simply the means to achieve certain levels of welfare, and therefore pays insufficient attention to potential unequal welfare outcomes that similar resources provide. Dworkin rejects the equality of welfare because he does not want to pick up the tab for the bad choices made by others. Indeed, if we are to understand people as equal moral agents, those same people are responsible for their decisions. This argument is sharpest when considering the problem of expensive tastes. ‘Imagine that a particular society has managed to achieve equality of welfare’, Dworkin writes, ‘now suppose that someone (Louis) sets out deliberately to cultivate some taste or ambition he does not now have, but which will be expensive in the sense that once it has been cultivated he will not have as much welfare … as he had before unless he acquires more wealth’ (1985, 206–​8). Compensating Louis for his deliberately acquired expensive tastes diminishes the resources available to improve the welfare of others. In short, there is an opportunity cost to improving the welfare of others who have more reasonable needs. In not so many words, Dworkin wants to police the boundary between needs and wants. 92

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As an alternative to welfare, Dworkin refocuses on the equality of resources. He believes this can best confront the question of responsibility to assess compensation for activities in an egalitarian society. Here one would not compensate the least advantaged by their social position. Rather, one would trace how these persons become the least advantaged. If these forces were beyond their control, then they would require compensation and efforts to improve their position to make them as advantaged as others in the society. If their position is due to their deliberate poor choices then there is less of an obligation to compensate them. To denote responsibility, Dworkin distinguishes between ambitions and endowments. He acknowledges that some, if not many, of our endowments –​ talents and dispositions –​are not of our own making. They are contingent features of persons and so we cannot claim responsibility for them, much like Chapter 4 discussed. Dworkin grants that intervention is required to modify the effects of ‘brute’ bad luck or poor natural endowments. To compensate people for their bad brute luck, Dworkin proposes social insurance to offset the costs of arbitrary economic developments by compensating those whose skills are not presently in demand. These insurances aim to convert ‘brute’ luck to ‘option’ luck. By way of example, suppose that by pure bad brute luck my house burned down. Such an outcome is unfortunate, but part of my misfortune may be because I declined to insure my property assuming cost effective and administratively simple policies were available. Extrapolating from Dworkin’s argument, if insurance was genuinely available, but I opted out, and the misfortune occurred, then there is no reason for an egalitarian society to subsidize my claims. This luck-​neutralizing position tolerates inequalities resulting from voluntary acts. In this case, subsidization is not a matter of fundamental political justice. And if there was any subsidization, it would be due to the virtuous character of society, not the demands of basic-​fundamental justice. To work well, Dworkin’s proposal requires an initial equal distribution of resources and then allows people to make the choices they see fit, keeping the relevant risks in mind. His idea of distribution involves the use of a frictionless hypothetical auction in which people are given equal means to bid for items. Bracketing aside the problems of auctions, of which there are many, Dworkin believes that by the end of the auction, everyone will have a fair bundle of resources leaving everyone satisfied. To ensure this, Dworkin introduces the envy test. If there is some envy, then that person could have bid for an item or resources themselves. This proposal retains Dworkin’s belief that a person should be held responsible for the things they do and do not do. There are some difficulties that underscore serious problems with Dworkin’s auction. First, the envy test can be satisfied under conditions where persons are not equal. I might have less wealth than someone else, 93

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but because I am pursuing my interests relatively unhindered, I consider myself satisfied and so do not envy that person. But say their wealth and disproportionate influence over the political process comes directly from exploiting me. This is not fair, for while I might not envy them, and I am relatively satisfied for the moment, they have more control over my life. Their ambitions direct my endowments and so can put me into positions where I would be vulnerable to bad luck. Second, there are questions about accommodating new members. Is distribution a one-​off event? Are intergenerational problems included? Dworkin does not say. Further, he overlooks that he is not describing an auction but rather a warehouse with lots of goods. If I do not receive any of the first-​choice items I bid on, I would be envious of others who did receive their first choices, even if they bid on bundles that are of no interest to me. Finally, Dworkin also places considerable weight on responsibility. But, for instance, even if a person is responsible for their adverse position, surely self-​created adversity does not diminish what they are due because of their moral status? Making those with talents the keepers of those without talent can raise concerns; the assumption is that being talented is the result of accumulated advantage. The conclusion, therefore, is that redistribution requires that the talented are taxed to support the involuntarily untalented. Furthermore, those who could be talented but choose not to maximally pursue their opportunities and the voluntarily untalented have no grounds for institutional support, it is said. This is because hypothetically they could have thrived if they had made the most of their abilities. In this respect, those with talents must pursue maximizing courses of action, not voluntary courses of action. However, this is the important point to note: as luck contributes considerably to what is or is not a talent, the talented, by their luck and not their choice, are in effect forced to labour for the social amelioration of others. Put another way, eliminating disadvantages which result from the bad luck of being involuntarily untalented comes at the expense of those who are advantaged. Indeed, it could be seen as humiliating, through making some persons responsible for their poor circumstances, while for others these same circumstances are designated as all bad luck. The latter set of claimants is eligible for welfare, while the former set are not. Wolff argues that this assessment requires persons ‘to formulate the thought and then claim that [they are] talentless’; these failures are ‘unable to gain employment even when there is no difficulty for others’ (1998, 115, 114). This ‘shameful revelation’ (Wolff 2010) can fragment political solidarity by creating resentment. Anderson (1999, 289) says this is because it ‘effectively dictates [to people] the appropriate uses of their freedom’. Not to put too fine a point on it, talented persons effectively become subordinated to collective goals they might not have chosen. This is an unappealing prospect for proponents of 94

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liberty and those who endorse a community of equal agents. Avoiding this situation supposedly requires stepping off a rigorous responsibility-​tracking ideal, which in turn purportedly devastates the entire theoretical exercise.

Luck neutralization G.A. Cohen’s work is much more sophisticated than Dworkin’s, especially when he considers luck neutralization. There is merit to this approach but also some important weaknesses. Cohen broadly agrees with Dworkin’s arguments against strong welfarism because it licences the transfer of resources from the very cheerful poor to the miserable wealthy. However, he states that Dworkin is incorrect when endorsing a strong resource approach. This is because it cannot assess and compensate people for the pain and suffering caused by their burdens. Instead, he seeks to identify the means that can minimize brute luck on the distribution of asset bases. This leads Cohen to attend to welfare as opposed to resources, since brute bad or good luck can intervene in how a person uses their resource allocation. Subsequently, Cohen argues that an adequate theory of equality focuses on equalizing advantage, thereby bypassing the debate over prioritizing either welfare or resources. He calls his approach a principle of ‘equality of access to advantage’. He understands it to be a ‘heterogeneous collection of desirable states’ characterized by knowing that you have as much going in your favour as someone else. This knowledge can lessen jealousy as it seeks to create advantages for everyone to satisfy their preferences. In short, Cohen says, ‘to the extent that equalisation is defensible, welfare is the right thing to equalise’ (2011, 8). Like Dworkin, Cohen would not compensate for inequalities in advantages that result from freely chosen decisions or risks. This requires that one can distinguish between benefits and burdens that are chosen and those that are not. This is articulated as desert, that is, a person does not deserve the benefits of certain advantages or the burdens of certain disadvantages, but they do deserve the consequences of freely made choices. These distinctions, however, are somewhat silent on matters of contingency, insofar as conditions influence choice-​making capacities. Some people are poor decision makers due to no fault of their own. They might have diminished capacities, poor role models, little education or live in a subculture that discourages thoughts about consequences. It seems harsh to say that these people deserve what comes to them. As Rawls (1951) acknowledges, persons need good information to make good decisions. In this respect we should not be preoccupied with bad choices, but rather with efforts to create conditions where people are encouraged to enhance their choice-​ making capacity regarding the resources at their disposal, while nevertheless picking up some of the costs for poor choices. There are some other good objections to Cohen’s point of view. For example, Thomas Scanlon (2018) 95

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argues that just distribution by equality should not be based on subjective criteria, but instead should discriminate between the important and the unimportant. In other words, there must be some independent criteria for compensation. That said, Scanlon’s proposal that equality is not just about the distribution of items –​whether they be welfare or resources, advantages and capabilities –​but rather that the attitude informing the choice to distribute items is reasonable. This topic is covered in Chapter 3. To conclude, my critique of liberalism turns on the belief that abstraction, without context, leads to disengaged social theory that is alienated from the full dimensions of the situation at hand. This is not to elevate context above all else, but to suggest that historical counterparts cannot be discounted in any analysis. This assertion is especially important now, given that there is a prevailing belief that advanced societies and the technological managerial apparatus do not need to revisit basic values. As an alternative to liberal social theory, I turn towards Marxian social theory as an anchor for the remainder of this book. In the final chapters, I survey several social analyses of the interplay between choice and chance in late modernity then move on to discuss the value and distribution of goods by sketching how the capability-​ priority principle can be accommodated within a Marxian paradigm, which is the subject of Chapter 8.

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A Social Analysis of Institutional Luck My goal in this chapter is to examine the thought behind the inclination or disinclination to use institutional means to collectivize risk and bad luck. I provide an overview of the distribution of luck to dispel simplistic analyses of rising inequality, as well as make the case that power and mystification are mechanisms that appeal to the idea of individual bad luck, thereby allowing institutions to back out of welfare commitments. I begin with an undeservedly lesser-​known debate between Brian Barry (2002), Keith Dowding (2003) and Steven Lukes and LaDawn Haglund (2005). They argued about the explanatory value of luck in political analysis. The debate revolved around two questions. First, is it possible to use luck as an analytical category; and second, if so, when should this category be used? This debate emerged from a question posed by Barry: ‘which is a better attribute, luck or power?’ For Barry, power is the ‘ability to change outcomes from what they would otherwise have been in the direction he desires’, whereas luck is a beneficial outcome that occurs when no power is exercised (1991, 272). Keith Dowding adds that some interests are predisposed to being lucky because ‘they get what they want from society without having to act’ or ‘because of the way society is structured’ (Dowding 1996, 71). Dowding, in a later piece, argues that ‘capitalists were lucky in the sense that governments would often do what capitalists want without them having to intervene in the policy process’ (2003, 305). Dowding notes that a person can pre-​emptively act to secure a more desirable position. However, he holds that this pre-​emptive action is conceptually attributed to the status of luck as opposed to being merely given that status by persons who might not be aware of how a particular system may privilege certain members. Lastly, Dowding offers little to account for the fleeting nature of fortune. What of bad luck or what of situations where good luck is lost? Is bad luck merely the converse of good luck? That is, no

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matter what power is exerted the outcome will never be favourable. And most importantly, is the working class systematically unlucky? For these reasons, Lukes and Haglund take issue with Dowding’s conception of luck. Their major criticism is that Dowding does not sufficiently distinguish luck from power. (Subtly, they even deride Dowding for not giving enough attention to the different forms of luck.) They make two rebuttals. First, capitalists constantly try to influence politicians to gain benefits that may be more difficult to access by others who are less powerful. This is not a factor of luck, but rather of petition and the greater ability of capitalists to mobilize institutional rules and personal resources to secure outcomes. Second, while actors might see themselves as being in a position of luck, their position that brings them luck must relate to structural conditions. This is different from the position that Dowding explicitly adopts in which structures have no inherent power. By contrast, Lukes and Haglund argue that these structural positions are not arbitrary, but rather, when examined over time, one can see that they are the result of power relations. The implication is clear: ‘luck’ must be placed in a historical context of power. Having detailed and dismissed several naïve understandings of power, Lukes concludes his well-​known essay Power by arbitrating the now famous Poulantzas–​Miliband debate on structure, individuality and constrained actors. Lukes makes the incisive point that ‘within a system characterized by total structural determinism, there would be no place for power’ (2005, 57). He is adamant that political analysis requires attention to the ‘exercise of power’ to assess if actors ‘could have acted differently’ to ‘fix responsibility’ (Lukes 2005, 57–​8). If one could have acted differently, then power was involved to shape how the actual sequence unfolded. This resonates with the general understanding of Frankfurt cases in that power can only be said to exist when it is possible to have responsibility in deciding between actualizing possible worlds, as power exists only where free will exists, a point also made persuasively by Giddens in his own early discussions of power. In both instances, I see Lukes and Giddens as providing the basis for understanding a modal conception of power. If they are correct, then the exercise of power can be evaluated according to a normative moral quotient. Lukes makes clear that one understands a social order when we see it as but one possible outcome of other possible outcomes; that is, when one understands that the same basic elements could have led to other kinds of societies. In other words, a social order is never inevitable. I want to emphasize this point: societies have a trajectory and complex mechanics, but these are historically contingent and constituted by power. A substantive critique of this process requires a discussion of epistemological issues, for to claim that a person’s beliefs regarding their perceptions are mistaken or incomplete, one requires the means to determine truth from falsehood and veracity from credence. One method is to create a theory of (social) 98

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science. It is outside the parameters of this book to comment substantively on scientific techniques and how they relate to a theory of science per se. However, another means is to invoke naturalism to differentiate between institutional luck and brute luck as it relates to choice and chance. The prime benefit of distinction is to keep the discussion of luck within the realm of humanism and orient a person to an assessment of their past fortunes as well as the quality of their prospects. As Lukes writes, ‘if we think of powerlessness as an injustice, rather than as bad luck or misfortune, is that not because we believe that there are those in a position to reduce or remedy it?’ (2005, 68). What is required to take this debate forward is a richer sociological refinement of luck. I imagine this sociological approach as one that emphasizes the importance of institutional luck; that is, the apparently naturalized but nevertheless structural allocations of life chances. These allocation mechanisms deeply affect individual and collective prospects for human flourishing. With commitment and definition, it seems eminently reasonable that analysts will give due attention to how luck is constructed, showing how the seemingly unconnected actions that affect people are in fact connected. As C. Wright Mills has written, ‘many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues’ (2000, 226). Accordingly, it is profitable to develop an analysis of luck showing how some circumstantial and life-​chance outcomes are ideologically coloured. In pursuing this social analysis of luck, one need not start with a blank chalkboard. Contemporary sociological thought emphasizes a person’s susceptibility to luck as a feature of historical circumstance and/​or the social roles they occupy. While no doubt preceding them, one can trace this line of thought in an arc from the work of Thorstein Veblen at the end of the 19th century to the late 20th-​century social thought of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, in addition to the philosophically inclined work of writers like Zygmunt Bauman. Individually, these writers cannot fully explain an analysis of luck; but each does have something unique and valuable to contribute. I am not suggesting that the work of these diverse scholars can be reconciled into a neat and tidy theoretical totality. There are important divergences and discontinuities between them on many points. Still, despite their differences, in my view, there is a sense in which their respective theoretical work shares in the project of analysing how modernity has changed causal imaginations in the West, thereby impacting the understanding of life chances.

Matters of production and consumption Veblen provides a useful starting point in mapping this project. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen considers the belief in luck to be an ‘archaic trait’, relating to a particular ‘habit of mind’ which developed 99

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before ‘predatory culture’ (2007, 180, 183). He describes belief in luck as constituting the following: [A]‌n animistic sense of relations and things, that imputes a quasi-​ personal character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-​personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. (Veblen 2007, 182) The tendency to reify forces either as objects, or working through objects, by having a ‘preternatural agency’ distorts ‘the appreciation of causal sequence’. The direct consequence is to diminish the perceived agency of the individuals who hold this belief. This tendency to explain ignava ratio is particularly acute when an event’s causes cannot be accounted for or fully understood. Therefore, the belief in luck is fallacious because people surrender control to non-​existent forces. While a person’s beliefs could be defended on several grounds, Veblen proposed that the industrial economy seeks and selects labourers who heed rationality. The supernatural, and the habit of mind they cultivate, Veblen argues, at the level of productive labour, are a ‘hindrance to the highest industrial efficiency’ and ‘incompatible with the requirements of the modern economic process’ (2007, 180). This is because the primitive mind is not the mind of the person expected to conduct rational economic labour. This affects the ‘individual’s serviceability for the industrial purpose’. Serviceability produces a subject who can comprehend and whose behaviours are set to ‘causal sequence’ and ‘quantitative causation’. The absence of this disposition lowers productivity. Accordingly, the modern industrial economy has an interest in promoting reason and rationality at the expense of a traditional systems of beliefs. Whereas the productive desire for rationality seeks to set belief in luck aside, it is a desirable trait with direct economic yields in consumptive practices. This is because the belief cultivates a temperament and proclivity for status, in turn driving conspicuous consumption. Veblen provides the example of gambling as it applies to the ‘sporting life’ and ‘betting on the issue of contests of strength and skill’ (2007, 180). Certainly, betting is related to the aspect of anticipation, but also to ‘enhancing the chances of success for the contestant on which it is laid’, and forms an incentive to back ‘one’s favourite in any contest’ by invoking the supposed sense of the ‘inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events’ (2007, 181). For Veblen, the belief in luck is ‘unmistakably a predatory feature’: one that is a ‘special manifestation of the instinct of workmanship’ because of a relation to ‘an inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations’ 100

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where ‘objects or events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end, whether this end or objective point of the sequence is conceived to be fortuitously given or deliberately sought’ (Veblen 2007, 182). Events are explained by their outcomes in relation to luck, but importantly also by a person’s relation to luck. Luck creates the temperament of comparison, thereby driving codes of importance, the objects of consumption and tastes. Further, it seeks to induce and conserve ‘a certain habitual recognition of the relation to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of status and allegiance’. This institutionalized the ‘relation of status between the human subject as inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior’ (Veblen 2007, 132; Veblen 2007, 134). Veblen concludes that the belief in luck puts brakes on the productive capacities of modern economies but does serve to foster consumptive practices. Thus, from the perspective of the modern industrial economy, there remains an ambivalent relationship to this belief. Irrespective of whether Veblen’s model of the belief in luck accurately depicts a set of relationships in industrial society, it most certainly cannot account for features of late modernity. As an example, financialization –​ minimally understood as a mode of flexible accumulation using a diversity of financial techniques to cement ‘secondary exploitation’ –​thrives on leveraging perceptions of outcomes, hedging assets and the deployment of statistical mathematical techniques to money. This ‘playing the market’ relies upon harnessing luck; being prepared to ‘run the risk’ as it were. Likely a practitioner of the trade would say that there is significant skill too. For instance, market practitioners might say that in the short term there is a significant factor of success that can be attributed to luck whereas in the long term there is a high skill factor involved. Luck is also involved when one considers how a mode of governance and its relation to flexible accumulation leads to the formation of a capitalist way of life, which includes, among other things, property speculation, precarious labour, the substitution of lifelong work with contractual work, a reserve army of labour, structural unemployment, privatization of state assets and interest payments. Thus, one needs to develop a model that better understands these features of contemporary economies.

The allocation of risk The German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, would arguably be sympathetic to certain features of Veblen’s argument. Like Veblen, Beck holds that industrial society seeks to rationalize the workplace while concealing the extent to which it depends upon traditional social forms; but what Beck would add is that science, knowledge and conceptions of rationality are tightly interwoven with modernity, as opposed to being objective measures and metrics that are 101

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outside and independent of this process. In this respect, although he stands adjacent to Habermas’ conception of modernization, Beck more generally follows in the critical theory tradition, which concerns itself with reason and rationality as efficiencies, as exemplified by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason. Like many others, Beck observed and commented upon modernity, the growth of transnational capital and governance institutions, but he distinguishes himself by showing how the rational belief in probabilistic actions is a key feature of a late industrial society. In Risk Society, Beck demonstrates how expert systems define standards of reason, rationality and risk. Experts, subject to disciplinary pressures, come to organize bodies of knowledge and the environment. The key point Beck makes is that there is an interrelationship between structural change and the understanding of causality. In his account, the belief in luck is not a result of a habit of mind from prehistoric times, but rather a recent condition of mind created by current economic and material arrangements. The appearance or disappearance of luck as a category of thought hinges on structural changes. Using Beck’s model, one can infer that in late modernity the concept of luck is replaced by chance, probabilities and risk. Risks are defined as the possibilities of physical harm due to a given technological process as determined by technocrats who are often distanced from the very people who will come to bear the risks and outcomes of these risks. Bad luck is often not simply bad luck, but rather the outcome of an extended chain of decisions and sequences. For example, in this view, the victims of Hurricane Katrina did not suffer brute bad luck, but rather they disproportionately carried the risks of their society due to eco-​racism. The politics of a risk society turns on who can create risk, which group will bear the consequences of the risks of a given structure and the general distribution thereof. Beck writes that ‘[r]‌isk may be defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself ’ (Beck 1992, 21). And: ‘In contrast to all earlier epochs (including industrial society), the risk society is characterized essentially by a lack: the impossibility of an external attribution of hazards. In other words, risks depend on decisions, they are industrially produced and in this sense politically reflexive’ (Beck 1992, 183). Beck is not claiming that a risk society has no industrial base or industrial-​type politics. Rather, he is saying that a risk society is concerned with the politics of risk assessment, perception and the allocation of chances of hazards occurring to specific groups of people. One myth is that modernity removes constraints from traditional society, but Beck maintains that while that is somewhat true, it is also true that it has ushered in new constraints powered by rationality. In effect, scientism has become the only acceptable form of public knowledge. The consequences of this change can be detected in social relations. For example, the individuation 102

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of social agents requires that they take responsibility for their conduct, even the parts which are the result of bad luck. Further, as these choices affect their life chances, persons become responsible for bearing the outcomes of their life chances even while there remains a structure in which these actions are said to take place. Regarding work, this leads to the decomposition of class structure and the place-​workplace, as well as offering individuals time to reflect upon flexibility. Beck names this the progressive ‘individualization of social inequality’ (1992, 92). Within this context, Beck’s main insight is that ‘the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risks’ (1992, 19). He continues: ‘the problems and conflicts relating to distribution in a society of scarcity overlap with the problems and conflicts that arise from the production, definition and distribution of techno-​scientifically produced risks’ (1992, 19). To be clear, risk is different from the chance of an event occurring. For instance, the odds of a person dying in a car accident are much higher than the odds of dying in an aeroplane accident, yet it is commonplace to view flying as riskier than driving a car. Differences like these illustrate that risk is subject to perceptions of potential outcomes rather than actual outcomes. While this lay perception may be built upon incomplete information, it still nevertheless has a kind of traction within a lay person’s mind and their subsequent actions. In short, perceptions of odds and credence play a considerable role in socially determining the distribution and concentration of risk. Through processes of financialization, risks have been measured, quantified, computed and commodified to become tradable entities and sources of capital accumulation. And, as the crisis in the global derivatives market from 2006 onwards demonstrates, trading in risk has its own risks. While taking these nascent development considerations into account when he first began theorizing, Beck dramatically updated the sociological framework by which we can understand both luck and risk and their respective roles in reflexive modernization against the structural change underway in the movement from an industrial society to a risk society. Beck calls complex chains of manufacturing ‘organised irresponsibility’. This is evident in societies where there are contested knowledge claims, and where being able to delineate ‘who did what’ is difficult. As an example, who is responsible and culpable for Hurricane Katrina? The US Army Corps of Engineers who built the levies, city planners who created the city in a certain fashion or elected officials who refused to do this or that. In this sense, holding someone accountable is difficult, albeit not impossible; it is just less clear than in a world of external risks. This is similarly so with who should undertake reparations and compensation. As I understand it, Beck’s main point is to problematize the idea of responsibility at the level of the individual since it is individuals who make decisions. But, when decisions are made in a context where manufactured risks render the decision moot, then 103

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we have what he calls a crisis of responsibility. This returns the discussion to the more sociological matter of individual decision making in the context of a collective will to do things that make such decisions immaterial in relation to the risk at hand.

Trust and distrust In his books The Consequences of Modernity (1990) and Modernity and Self-​ identity (1991), Anthony Giddens comes to somewhat similar conclusions as Beck, particularly in respect to the institutional analysis of modernity. While their terminology is different, there is a sense in which Giddens and Beck are both concerned with a similar problem: the social dimension of trust. However, due to his theory of structuration, Giddens tends to have a stronger analysis of the moments in which agents negotiate the constraints imposed by institutions, organizations and administrations, the role of trust in abstract systems and the symbolic tokens generated by such systems. If this kind of sociological analysis is disorientating, Giddens holds that understanding such disorientation lies in appreciating the discontinuity between traditional life and modernity, what Ernest Gellner (1988, 64) has called the ‘Big Ditch’. Discontinuity refers not only to the ‘pace’ and ‘scope’ of change, but also to how these developments have axes of ‘security versus danger’ and ‘trust versus risk’ (Giddens 1990, 6). To this extent, Giddens’ understanding of risk is grounded in his presentation of the reflectivity of modernity, the double hermeneutic and the importance of ontological security. Unlike Beck, Giddens holds that a risk society is a characteristic of late modernity, as opposed to merely being its rough equivalent. Such a tweak is not a triviality, but rather points to how risk society itself is a form maturation and cultivation of some early modern elements. ‘Risk is not the same as hazard or danger’, Giddens explains: Life in the Middle Ages was hazardous; but there was no notion of risk and there doesn’t seem in fact to be a notion of risk in any traditional culture. The reason for this is that dangers are experienced as given. Either they come from God, or they come simply from a world which one takes for granted. The idea of risk is bound up with the aspiration to control and particularly with the idea of controlling the future, rather a risk society is increasingly preoccupied with the future. (Giddens 1999, 3) This risk society generates ‘a high technological frontier which absolutely no one completely understands’, but it also ‘generates a diversity of possible futures’ (Giddens 1999, 3). Still, the lack of complete comprehension brings forth a set of dangers like the ability to kill on an industrial scale, the threat 104

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of nuclear war and the climate emergency. Certainly, modernity offers much, but it is a ‘double edge character’ (Giddens 1990, 10). The character has several components. One is ‘disorientation’ that ‘expresses itself in the feeling that systematic knowledge about social organization cannot be obtained’ and stems from ‘the sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control’ (Giddens 1990, 2–​3). There are two main transformations: ‘the end of nature’ and the ‘end of tradition’ (1999, 3). By the end of nature, Giddens means that little of the ‘physical world [is] untouched by human intervention’; moreover, ‘[a]‌t a certain point, somewhere over the past 50 years or so, we stopped worrying so much about what nature could do to us, and we started worrying more about what we have done to nature’ (Giddens 1999, 3). By the end of tradition, Giddens means societies ‘where life is no longer lived as fate’ (1999, 3), because the aspiration and means to control the future exist in abundance. This end of tradition is the equivalent of Beck’s individualization. I understand this to mean that predetermined roles and expectations are not imposed on people. This is not absolute: Giddens admits that classes do, to a degree, still have a fate. Modernity has introduced a degree of social mobility unheard of and unimaginable to those who lived in traditional societies. Still, one must also recognize that life chances continue to hinge on birth and other inherited factors so that we should not be caught up in believing that we are at the end of tradition, just that the tradition has changed form. Giddens divides risk into two kinds: external and manufactured. External risk applies to events that occur unexpectedly but in somewhat of a predictable fashion, for instance a person losing his or her job in a shrinking market or a train accident where poor maintenance leads to a derailing. But, because these risks are predictable, a society can insure against them. For example, a welfare state is a security state insofar as it implements collective insurance to secure against fate by providing social services and income redistribution. It is attentive and features the desire to extend control over circumstances somewhat beyond the control of the individual. To digress slightly, Giddens notes that justification for the welfare state in an era of manufactured risk becomes increasingly difficult, as many of the risks faced and need security are manufactured. Because of increased knowledge, one can blame the state, corporations or others for their activities that have negativity impaired you. There are an increased number of things for which a person can claim security and due. Manufactured risks are the by-​product of human development itself. William Leiss (1986) describes these as ‘risks that are deliberately undertaken –​for the sake of benefits conceived in advance –​by means of our technological mastery over nature’. They come about through the creation of new environments, conditions and technologies of which we 105

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have little experience. The problem is less how to solve these risks than how they are managed at a personal, social and political level, but this can also bring about a feeling of powerlessness or lack of responsibility. Events like Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill deeply affect the quality of patterns and life chances. Giddens and Beck agree that manufactured risk has affected the conception of risk: how we are subject to the risks of things we have implemented. According to Giddens, the political decision making of late modernity is characterized by who bears risks; in effect, how and why risks are allocated and distributed. Understanding the reasons for risk distribution becomes one means to assess the sociological shifts in late modernity as well as offering an insight into the power dynamics of contemporary society. He states that this introduces a reorientation of values as people attempt to cope with manufactured risks. This in turn has ‘strong implications for rethinking the political agenda’ (Giddens 1999, 5), because risks are quantified in terms of the values they are said to preserve or enhance. If we combine Giddens’ thought in The Consequences of Modernity with that presented in Modernity and Self-​identity, one can see the initial development of the conception that in a risk society, politics is more than a discrete practice; it is also a particular way of thought, a habit of mind that is distant from Rawls’ reasonableness. We understand this by drawing upon Giddens’ concept of the disembedding mechanism. When using the term disembedding mechanism, Giddens means an object, practice, thought or moment that ‘lifts out’ ‘social relations from the local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-​space’ (Giddens 1990, 21). If facticity is the experience of being thrown into the world to become disoriented, disembedding is the lifting out of the experience to be disoriented. Giddens identifies two types of disembedding mechanisms: ‘symbolic tokens’ and ‘expert systems’. Symbolic tokens are the ‘media of interchange which can be “passed around” without regard to the specific characteristics of individuals or groups that handle them at any particular juncture’ (Giddens 1990, 22), while expert systems are thought of in a similar manner as Beck. Disembedding mechanisms combine elements of both symbolic tokens and expert systems, albeit in differing mixtures depending upon the object, practice, thought or moment. The important insight that Giddens makes is that all disembedding mechanisms ‘depend upon trust’ (Giddens 1990, 26). Accordingly, trust is ‘involved in a fundamental way with the institutions of modernity’, and ‘trust here is vested, not in individuals, but in abstract capacities’ (Giddens 1990, 26). For example, expert systems are not related to actual persons per se, but rather the abstract principles that come to be associated with their station. Trust, for Giddens, is like faith insofar as ‘the confidence vested in probable outcomes expresses a commitment to 106

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something rather than just a cognitive understanding’ (Giddens 1990, 27). One trusts the building not to collapse. One trusts bankers to not steal your money. Along similar lines, Charles Tilly thinks that a degree of distrust is ultimately a good thing, even going so far as to describe it as a ‘necessary condition of democracy’. ‘Contingent consent entails, in principle’, he explains, an unreadiness to offer rulers, however they were elected, blank checks to do as they please with society’s resources. It implies the threat that if they do not perform in accordance with citizens’ expressed collective will, citizens might not only turn them out of office but also withdraw compliance from such risky government-​run activities as military service, jury duty and tax collection. (Tilly 2007) Contingent consent implies two things. The first, in practice, is the responsibility of protecting the political community, which ensures that liberty rests with the citizen, and in doing so, draws the person into a tradition of protecting the conditions for liberty. That itself brings them into protecting a living moral tradition. The second is that liberals seek to maintain agency to recall elected officials. Trust, as a disembedding mechanism, is a way of thinking where politics is rife with contingency. Further, ‘the concept of risk replaces that of fortuna but this is not because agents in pre-​modern times could not distinguish between risk and danger’, Giddens writes, ‘rather it represents an alteration in the perception of determination and contingency, such that human moral imperatives, natural causes, and chance reign in [sic] place of religious cosmologies (Giddens 1990, 34). If this is the case, there is a particular boundary issue in Giddens’ analysis that needs to be addressed; there is a difference between a risk society and a society which uses trust to manage the contingency it encounters. I hold that Giddens does not stress or separate out this difference strongly enough, and the strength of his analysis suffers for it.

Precarious ways of life If Beck and Giddens have made an oversight, it is that their attempts to understand relationships between trust and risk lack an explicit account of ethical conduct against a condition of disoriented facticity. In my view, the work of Zygmunt Bauman does not have this limitation. While Bauman used a different conceptual vocabulary, he nevertheless adopted a similar, if slightly qualified, industrial society account of modernity to that of Beck and Giddens. Bauman contends that the project of modernity is wary of heterogeneity, ambivalence and uncertainty and therefore seeks to impose order onto supposed chaos to replace it with universalizing and uniform 107

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ways of life and codes of understanding. In contrast, postmodernity, which signals a tolerance for heterogeneity, ambivalence and uncertainty, is itself wary of authority claiming universality, and proposes a de-​centered politics as normative. As shorthand for each of these two cultural formations, Bauman uses the figures of the legislator, who represents modernity, and the interpreter, who represents postmodernity. Underlying the use of these two cultural figures is an argument about the changing condition and role of intellectuals. In modernity, intellectuals were in the service of legislators and administrative ends, whereas in postmodernity (where intellectuals are no longer required for governance) they assume the position of interpreters whose task is to mediate the interaction of divergent social clusters to build solidarity. For these reasons, I turn to his work to account for how people and institutions attempt ethical conduct in the wake of late modernity. In this sense, Bauman’s work provides a useful bridge between the philosophical tone of much of my earlier commentary on luck and the more sociological accounts under discussion here. However, before discussing Bauman’s proposal for ethical conduct, human flourishing and well-​being, it is useful to provide a brief overview of his thought to illustrate the motivations underscoring his positions. These motivations are most evident in the period bookended by the publication of Legislators and Interpreters (1987) and Life in Fragments (1995), before his move to explore the concept of ‘liquid’ modernity. Bauman has long maintained that the central contest of late modernity is not over formal politics per se, or the struggle over productive capacities or the extraction of surplus value, but rather the struggle over culture and the way of life. This is because extraction is no longer a matter of one group with ties to ownership over the means of production seeking to extract surplus value, but rather has become a whole way of life. Accepting Bauman’s point means accepting that social conflict focuses on the attempt to establish and modify ethical systems of thought and practice. For Bauman, socialism is a ‘counter-​culture’ in that it proposes a different way of life (Bauman 1976, 35). His fear is that what was done to the ‘liberal-​capitalist culture’ could be repeated in other non-​political ventures. Accordingly, Bauman’s thought opposes the comprehensiveness of the liberal philosophical doctrine. Traditional Marxism is also wanting, in his view, because it tends to attribute the various conflicts in modernity to economic relations, often at the expense of a delicate understanding of ethics and conduct. Conflicts here do not concern class interests, but fracture and skew along social lines as divisions and alliances are constantly being redrawn based upon the prevailing interests in the complex identity. Further, they are generally blind to the systematic manner of conflict over the reproductive capacities of society. For this reason, Bauman thinks it would be better to analyse late modernity according to 108

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social power, by which he means giving attention to interest groups and their consumptive practices to understand how they reproduce themselves. Bauman’s conception of modernity has two attributes: ‘impersonalism’ and ‘plebisicitarianism’. Roughly, impersonalism is the decline of paternalistic relations, which shifts relations from traditional society and creates an impartial subject. In contrast, plebisicitarianism is the process in which the creation of the citizen-​subject, to use Giddens’ term, has an attitude of civil indifference. Together these combine to produce a political realm, the legitimacy of which depends on the degree to which there is respect for the rule of law. As legal equality is established so must the consistent standard of judgement be developed. In short, people become equally bound by universally binding norms irrespective of their circumstances. For example, while it is no doubt unfortunate that a person in a wheelchair is not equally endowed with the capacity to walk, this inequality does not diminish that person’s political standing, or his or her claim to impartiality before the law or with politics. But this is a difficult promise to hold, given that decisions are conditioned, as Giddens points out, by a way of thinking about politics. Furthermore, the modern political trade-​off is that equality comes through subjugation to a set of norms, but this is at the expense of considering alternative political arrangements. In other words, politics shrinks because it no longer confronts the possibility of alternative political articulations or arrangements. Politics confines itself to the struggle to interpret, administer and extend the application of norms. The shift from modernity to late modernity or postmodernity highlights the ‘pluralism of authority’ and ‘centrality of choice’ (Bauman 1991). This is part and parcel of the move from a society based upon production to one based on consumption. Or, as Bauman has claimed in his book, Liquid Modernity, a society which is ‘normatively regulated’ to one without norms, and is instead guided by ‘seduction, ever rising desires and volatile wishes’ (Bauman 2000, 76). Here norms are associated with production, while fickleness is associated with consumptive practices. For this reason, Bauman believes that ethics over the conduct of ways of life is a key characterizing attribute of postmodernity (2001a, 21). In this movement, Bauman’s central point is that ethics is increasingly individuated and privatized, and is no longer found in the large institutions, but rather fall squarely ‘on the individual’s shoulders’. The move from traditional societies, and even from industrial society, abolished institutional reference groups that orient and assist persons in making life choices. Institutional reference groups today ‘are only too willing to cede the worries of definitions and identities to the individual initiative’ (Bauman 2000, 22). In this respect, institutions have almost been fully institutionally disinvested of responsibility for shaping a person. Responsibility is now an attribute of the individual, not the society, or even the central role-​players in that 109

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society. Collective forms of action are thus no longer the most appropriate political responses, for impartiality gives rise to being inconsiderate of others. But Bauman believes that the demise of institutional reference groups and their involvement in making life choices has not vanished. Rather, they have become more discrete. While late modernity has seen an increase in emancipation and social mobility, as well as the expansion and ability to act upon life choices, they are, to continue the liquid metaphor that Bauman uses, also wet, slippery and quick to evaporate, meaning that they are prone to passing through a person’s hands. The result is that full-​ blooded self-​determination and autonomy, to use the Kantian term, is the exception rather than the common experience for most people. Moreover, if the unencumbered life of wholly free determination does exist, it does so for those that are members of the global elite, whose interests are not tied to any one locality, and their numbers are so small that realistically it need not matter what they think the benefits of this practice of politics happens to be. The myth of no institutional referents and full responsibility has two ramifications. The first is that people become preoccupied with their private problems to the extent that they mistake them for public ones, which is a grotesque misapplication of the ‘personal as political’ adage. The discussion of ‘public interest’ becomes an impoverished ‘what is in my interest’ form of politics, supporting the mistaken belief that the public display of private sentiments is in the interest of the collective: the ‘public display of private affairs and the public confessions of private sentiments’ (Bauman 2000, 37). Public life is narrow, to the extent that citizenship is thought of as a trivial, and often inconvenient, identity. There ceases to be shared common public interests. In line with this shift, Bauman claims that a condition of work has emerged, one bearing little resemblance to the condition of work in industrial modernity. Work in liquid modernity is characterized by the increasing separation of local politics from global forces, an increased capacity for labour mobility both as occupational mobility and spaces of work, and the emergence of a general state of precarity due to the reregulatory practices occurring at the global level. When combined, these factors create general conditions of Unsicherheit, that is, the uncertainty and insecurity that politics encounters: ‘Ambivalence may be, as before, a social phenomenon, but each one of us faces it alone, as a personal problem’ (Bauman 2001b, 69). This precarity has consequences for how secure people feel in living their lives, and the extent to which the community wishes to support, or at the very least endorse, their life chances. Further, this can connect to low social capital and the extent to which people need to keep updating their short-​ shelf-​life skill sets at personal expense. Bauman makes the disarming claim that in conditions of liquid modernity the poor are perhaps the only ones 110

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to experience a degree of certainty, for they know that they cannot escape their positions. The development of global inequalities that are based upon the different structural allocations of life chances is a characteristic of structural uncertainty. For Bauman, it is not incidental that the richest maintain their stations in life, while ordinary people live under conditions of great uncertainty. Indeed, most of the rich profit off the uncertainty created by liquid modernity. In other words, there is a greater institutionalization of social and personal contingency. As a practical way to recover certainty, Bauman calls for an overhauling of the public/​private distinction, and a type of politics modelled on the agora, in the hopes that this will close the gap between local and global politics as well as provide the means to revitalize collective political forms. To respond to this, Bauman –​along the lines of public reason liberals, deliberate democrats and public sphere theorists –​calls for a model of politics along the lines of forums where public interests can be developed through discussion and commonalities discovered (Bauman 2000, 51). Generally, Bauman is in line with others who call for more, not less, public discussion. In some senses, Bauman seeks a ‘republican model of unity’ to advance the ‘joint achievement of the agents engaged in self-​identification pursuits’ (Bauman 2000, 178). As a caveat, Bauman has distanced himself from communitarian aspirations, for he feels that they promote an ethic community model which aspires to homogeneity and hence the nation state. There are, however, some problems with Bauman’s arguments. One criticism relates to the excessively negative colouring Bauman gives to the processes he observes to the extent that it blinds readers to some of the positive by-​products of liquid modernity. Regarding responsibility, provided it is pure responsibility, as opposed to some lay version, this may not be a bad thing. Regarding private concerns, identity politics has certainly made progressive inroads to the expansion of individual rights. Inborn, civic or cultural ascriptions do not always overdetermine a person’s station, and these are good developments. In response, Bauman might say that these immediate gains of political ground come at the expense of developing strategic forethought, because the concessions inadvertently perpetuate the notion that the presentation of the individual himself becomes the subject of a project of that same person. The problem is that where personal identity was once a given, it is now a constant task that sucks a considerable amount of energy from human life that could be spent elsewhere; political capital tends to be invested in personal exercises. Some of these insights have merit, but Bauman errs when construing these items as wholly negative. Constant contention to enforce personal and civic rights and entitlements is required to shatter rigid and given social stations, and this does have redeeming elements. A second criticism relates to the tension between Bauman’s use of the notions of ‘liquids’ and ‘solids’. On the one hand, Bauman claims that 111

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all aspects of contemporary social life are fluid and uncertain, while the emergence of a new social hierarchy will become rigid. This is all good and fine, but apart from social mobility in time and space, to what extent is it substantively different from industrial modernity? The boundaries between elites and the other classes are just as solid. As one reviewer remarks, all Bauman has done is replace ‘capital with mobility as the yardstick for “measuring” class’. A third criticism is that he wants to regenerate the agora, the public/​private space, so that private troubles can enter the public and ensure that private issues do not corrupt the public (Gane 2001, 202) –​ perhaps like deliberate democracy –​but Bauman provides little guidance to this. Besides, the agora is arguably a poor model for public life in contemporary societies. Aside from the agora proposal, in In Search of Politics, Bauman advances the claim that ‘individual liberty can only be a product of collective work’ (1999, 7). But this is hardly controversial –​perhaps it is even a democratic cliché –​so I hardly see how this is different from boilerplate liberal contractualism. On balance, Bauman’s contribution draws our attention to a kind of double movement that has taken place in late modernity. In this double movement some people, due to their class position, are better able to access and convert opportunities. But this gain is at the expense of denying opportunities to others. In other words, there exists a bifurcation of life chances, such that some persons can live a secure life and others live in more risky, more precarious, circumstances. In doing so, Bauman cuts to the key target for a critique of institutional luck.

Institutional luck as power and mystification Working through the arguments developed by Veblen, Beck, Giddens and Bauman, I have sought to demonstrate how concepts like risk, luck and chance have been co-​opted by institutions to justify the institutional allocation and distribution of luck, both good and bad. This involves the reification and social distancing of life chances away from ordinary persons such that a person becomes oblivious to the asymmetrical burdens of risk carried by persons in different classes and their commensurate differential exposure to (un)foreseen hazards. When combining Bauman’s idea of double movement with Veblen’s identification of the licensing of certain kinds of beliefs based upon social position, the differential aspects of institutional luck become acutely visible; it is conducive for some to use their power to skew luck in their favour while denying this same attribute to others. The result is the cultivation of a belief that to get ahead they should not rely upon luck or fortune, but rather on their talents. The amount of luck that some persons get is masked or withheld, depending on one’s social position. Herein, there is a sense 112

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in which institutional luck is a shorthand explanation for the interplay of a complex set of causes that a person may have some to no knowledge of. In this respect, the concept is analytically useful insofar as it opens an examination of the social construction of life chances and how they are skewed towards certain social asset bases associated with such things as class, race and gender. Luck, at least in a market society, is used to cover the gaps created by the outcomes of seemingly disproportionate incentive and reward structures. Conceived in such a manner, institutional luck stands adjacent to Weber’s (2005) idea of disenchantment. Whereas disenchantment attends to the social outcomes of methodological naturalism eagerly applied to the wider world, institutional luck seeks to pass over a naturalistic account of an event’s causes altogether. Rather, invoking luck as an explanation for individual or social outcomes obscures much of the perpetuation of structural bias or neglect. In this fashion, the idea of institutional luck is a component of mystification. Mystification can be understood as a designed misperception of reality to turn persons into types of social subjects. This involves incorporating and organizing their lived experiences into an existing causal imagination, which in turn justifies and legitimizes a particular means of distribution. In this conception, institutional luck is a tool of power used to serve discrete interests. For example, many capitalist countries have insolvency laws that allow capitalists to take riskier actions due to governmental support. Asserting that luck exists is a technique of deliberate mystification meant to make a given population easier to govern. This shifts any potential bad luck from the social structure and places it disproportionately on the individual. In this system of thought, good luck is understood as a disproportionate increase of returns on investments of power through certain opportunities. Yet, this configuration of good luck is simultaneously removed from viewing conditions wherein investments are made, plotted and averaged out. It is not due to luck that investment returns are either positively or negatively disproportionate, but rather it is due to the investment structure itself and the powers which circulate, thus making or hindering various opportunities. Here the ‘luck’ of a particular condition significantly influences possible opportunities. More generally, Marxists point to commodity fetishism and capital fetishism as social examples of partial structural functions of mystification. I take these comments and observations as sound and so set them aside. Rather, my point lies in another direction, that being the mystification of the actual and the possible. Mystification distorts the character of these effects, their causes and their outcomes. Altogether, these delimit the conditions of existence and possibility, making it difficult for persons to conceive of other kinds of social arrangements. It is for this reason that one needs to offer functional and pragmatic alternatives; that is, one must make the case for, 113

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and present to others, different policy choices for institutional management. Complementing this delimitation is the problem of institutional obstacles to demystification; in this respect, the continual institutional investment in luck is one such obstacle. This is because using luck in this fashion naturalizes and mystifies these processes of differential distributions and justifies outcomes that, when explained in other terms, would create an awareness of conditions in which opportunities slide disproportionally to certain segments of the population.

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Markets Are Not Morally Neutral It can be jarring to jump from the often abstract realms of political philosophy and political sociology to the seemingly more pragmatic realm of political economy –​the economic and political realms that surround the lives of people living in real societies. But it is only by doing this that we can ground such abstractions in ways that contain suggestions for ameliorating the challenges of inequality outlined in Chapter 1. Recalling figures cited about the concentration of wealth and capital in the 1% (this group owning approximately 30% of all private wealth, 40% of financial wealth, 50% of stocks and 60% of business equity), while there is some disagreement about precisely how this prosperity was produced, capitalism, at least the kind regulated and presided over by liberal democracy, has raised standards of living, as well as types of human opportunities, to previously inconceivable levels, and broadened them to the population at large, albeit at extreme environmental and human costs. As Robert Skidelsky (2011) notes, ‘capitalism is a superb system for overcoming scarcity. By organising production efficiently, and directing it to the pursuit of welfare rather than power, it has lifted a large part of the world out of poverty’.  Judged post hoc, one is likely to miss the significance of how this development has altered human practice and ethical considerations. Still, as Marx (1987) also understood, capitalism is also rife with endemic inequalities, exploitation and alienation, plus it is a system marked by a recurrent tendency towards crises. As Paul Samuelson has said, ‘the whole history of capitalism has had up-​bubbles in real estate and down-​bubbles after something different’ (Okonogi, Shimbun and Samuelson 2009). These bubbles have caused significant harm to people. Nor, despite Simon Kuznet’s argument that ‘income inequality would automatically decrease in advanced phases of capitalist development, regardless of economic policy choices or other differences between countries, until eventually it stabilized at an acceptable level’, has higher economic growth automatically reduced poverty or inequality (Piketty 2014, 11). Despite the rewards of capitalism, the dividends of this system are unfairly acquired, uneven and causally 115

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connected to economic contractions that disproportionately hurt those that laboured for that growth, to put it mildly. Contrary to the 1950s mantra, growth has not been a tide that lifts all boats. This is a point now made routinely by people other than Marxists. This reality speaks to the broad political question of how people face the personal and economic risks that influence their lives. Of late, this has been brought up in the United States with debates around health care and medical risks regarding provision and payment, but it also speaks to workers’ quality of life in retirement, whether these are guaranteed by government or fixed to market returns. This discussion is historically attuned to the changing nature of risks vis-​à-​vis technical and economic investments. This is a particularly pressing question if we keep in mind that most persons must sell their labour within capitalism to socially reproduce themselves and their loved ones, or otherwise face the real prospect of death. That stark ‘choice’ illustrates how capitalism is a form of compulsory labour

Inequality, incomes and prices There is a growing recognition that capitalism has a built-​in tendency to skew wealth towards the ruling class. Indeed, this is one of the essential goals of this kind of polity. This point, though, is not, and has not been, the prevailing view in US public policy discourse. Take for example the views of Greg Mankiw, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the George W. Bush administration. He has attempted to provide an ethical justification condoning social inequality by downplaying the extent to which the 1%’s income is an unfair by-​product of market imperfections: ‘In the standard competitive labour market’, he writes, ‘a person’s earnings equal the value of his or her marginal productivity’ (2013, 30). Next, he proposes a naïve version of just deserts: ‘people should receive compensation congruent with their contributions’. These contributions are valued according to a free market. The role of government is to provide basic public goods while pressing the social world into this mould, not to confiscate a person’s just income even if it is endorsed by majoritarianism. There are several problems with Mankiw’s position. First, this line of reasoning misconstrues value as simply price. Even if one were to concede to his general terrain –​and one should not –​some people’s contributions cannot be valued by prices or fees alone, or by prices or fees at all. The most common example is socially reproductive work in the household. Moreover, Mankiw fails to appreciate that the extent to which a person can contribute is coloured by contingency and luck: because most of the factors that determine what is considered a marginal contribution are outside the realm of a person’s control or attributes. These include fluctuations in a product’s prices, the changing structure of demand, weather’s role in harvests 116

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and technological developments. Thus, Mankiw unnecessarily disembeds value and prices from a social setting. In addition to this category error, Mankiw’s kind of analysis fails to acknowledge the class struggle over surplus value. Even being generous, contracts regarding labour fees and prices are always –​because they are made between unequal parties –​tainted by capital’s coercion. Thus, labour’s settlements are made begrudgingly and not fairly. Furthermore, and without wishing to digress into a treatise on state theory, governments tend to pursue their own interests and in turn only assist labour or capital when they need support for their own causes. Subsequently, Mankiw does not have a realistic appraisal of the role of government. Overall, his reasoning errs even within his own framework. The theory of marginal productivity does not constitute a theory of just deserts. A somewhat more grounded discussion of inequality is presented by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. Their work represents the conventional understanding of inequality, whereby it is the result of a ‘race between education and technology’. They write: That the twentieth century was both the American Century and the Human Capital Century is no accident. Economic growth in the modern period requires educated workers, managers, entrepreneurs, and citizens. Modern technologies must be invented, innovated, put in place, and maintained. They must have capable workers at the helm. (Goldin and Katz 2008, 1–​2) They attribute this to American ‘exceptionalism’. What they mean is intentional institutional intervention to use education to create human capital. They write that relative to European states, the US had free and accessible secondary schools. This ‘flexible and multifaceted higher education system’ was suitable for much of the early 20th century but was unable to adapt to late 20th-​century labour demands (Goldin and Katz 2008, 19). For the 21st century, Goldin and Katz argue that technological change will require ever more skilled labour, in turn creating an earnings gap between skilled and unskilled workers. Their solution to inequality is increasing the supply of skilled workers. Development economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor (2012) object to this narrative. They note that Goldin and Katz neglect the extent to which educational ‘exceptionalism’ arose because democratically inclined local populations successfully resist elite designs, thereby overlooking how political contention and resistance created the diverse and plural educational institutions they celebrate. They also note how presently, the various levels of US government invest more into education for the rich than the poor, despite some studies indicating that elite education adds little to no value 117

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to non-​elites (also see Dale and Krueger 2011). This is unlikely to change if the rich continue to marginalize the poor. Contrary to Mankiw’s and Goldin and Katz’s conception of ‘human capital’, John Marsh’s study of the United States economy and higher education deflates the promissory potential of education as a luck-​ neutralizing policy tool. Applying his sharp eye and close reading skills to education econometrics, Marsh demonstrates how the consensus on higher education is a confluence of various forces that avoid public engagement over the role of class in determining the allocation and quality of life chances. Instead, most stakeholders obsessively concentrate on the efficacy of education at the expense of examining the differentials of, and interest in, economic power. Even well-​regarded economic commentators believe ‘outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super rich … are diversions from the main issue [which is] largely one of (a lack of) education’ (Marsh 2011, 15). The consensus is that inequality is the by-​product of poorly formed, or executed, policy. If they are raised, the doubts regarding this consensus are quickly brushed aside by pragmatic politics. Despite the hostile, antagonistic impasse that is facing US politics, all parties agree that higher education is vital to growth and prosperity. Here the university system is regarded as being reasonably democratic (relatively accessible) and reasonably meritocratic (through a four-​year ranking). This provides just enough to satisfy all: conservatives, because it provides justification to not support those that fail; and progressives, because it provides access to opportunity that can overcome starting gate inequality. While there is strong activism on this issue, within the mainstream this arrangement permits inequalities for which a person is said to be responsible. But this arrangement is too vulnerable to moral luck and is perhaps the worst model for mass education for it fails to address the actual prospects for success, which for those familiar with Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works, or Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed, will know is unlikely for students when the system is rigged. Marsh proceeds to demonstrate that when structural issues are discussed in educational policy, it is often under a neutral technocratic rubric of matching teaching to economic needs. The current thought in education policy is that the university system should provide workplace preparation through professional degree programmes, the cost of which is borne by the individual themselves through non-​dischargeable loans, because businesses are unwilling to carry the costs of vocational training. Given that high school attempts to develop a well-​rounded citizen capable of functioning within society, but that the new economy requires hyper-​specialized knowledge and skills, universities have been tasked with signalling that the person is vocationally competent. The proliferation in professional master programmes is testament to this process. But Marsh plainly points out that vocational 118

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training for economic mobility is misplaced because that path soon becomes bottlenecked as everyone attempts to take that route. To quote Marsh, ‘[t]‌he US economy, despite claims to the contrary, will continue to produce more jobs that do not require a college degree than jobs that do. A college degree will not make those jobs pay any more than the pittance they currently do’. He expresses this neatly when he writes that ‘[a] PhD working as a bartender earns bartender wages, not a professor’s salary’ (2011, 20). One might add, this bartender would be burdened by enormous student debt which greatly hinders their chances of upward economic mobility. As his analysis applies to prospects for equitable social change, Marsh thinks this burden of hope is too much for education alone to carry. Turning attention to living standards, Harry Brighouse and Erik Olin Wright demonstrate that the standard of living has improved; and indeed, that this consumption has gone towards making durable investments which have improved many people’s lives, as well as productive and reproductive capacities. ‘If you take virtually any list of consumer durables –​refrigerators, TVs, cars, indoor toilets, air conditioners, and etc.’, they write, ‘the percentage of people in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution who own these things has increased significantly over the past thirty years’ (Brighouse and Wright 2002, 194). Further, square footage living space has increased, as has life expectancy across all income brackets. Lastly, ‘if one measures per capita income in households (rather than individuals wages or even per household income), it has risen significantly even at the bottom of the income distribution since family size has declined’ (Brighouse and Wright 2002, 194). One therefore must acknowledge substantial economic development arising from capitalism. Brighouse and Wright’s data demonstrate why there is some difficulty in making the popular case for the badness of inequality in the United States. Setting aside racism for the moment, it is difficult to solicit sympathy and attention to attend to the social problems of certain types of inequality if standards of living have improved. An argument on the badness of inequality then must present itself in terms of undue differentials and fairness, as opposed to minimally acceptable standards of living or the changing pattern of income. There are some caveats. Wright and Brighouse do not claim that income inequality helped raise living conditions for those at the bottom, nor do they morally condone increasing inequality. Additionally, Brighouse and Wright collated data on occupation growth and decline. Ordinarily, radical accounts attribute turbulence in the American labour market to transformations in economic practice, such as the dismantling and offshoring of manufacturing bases. This is said to reap large swaths of occupations leaving people unemployed and surviving on precious incomes indentured to corporate strategy. As they write, ‘[t]‌he iconic image is of the reduction of employment in the steel and auto-​industries and the 119

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expansion of fast-​food employment’ (Brighouse and Wright 2002, 195). In contrast, Brighouse and Wright show that if one surveys the national labour force, the distribution of median earnings of job types indicates that there is polarization between the best and worse deciles, but also that the top three deciles account for nearly half of the net expansion of jobs. Acemoglu and Autor’s research broadly agrees with this analysis, adding that ‘[s]‌tarting in the past two decades, earnings growth has become increasingly nonmonotone in skill and wage levels, with more rapid growth at the upper and (surprisingly) lower deciles of the wage distribution than at the median’ (2012, 15). This is matched by job polarization, by which they mean ‘the simultaneous growth of employment in high skill, high wage occupations and low skill, low wage occupations’ (Acemoglu and Autor 2012, 15). Altogether this means that ‘rapid employment growth in both high and low education jobs’ has ‘substantially reduced the share of employment accounted for by “middle skill” jobs. In 1979, the four middle skill occupations –​sales, office and administrative workers, production workers, and operatives –​accounted for 58.9 percent of employment. In 2007, this number was 47.5 percent, and in 2010, it was 44.5 percent’ (Acemoglu and Autor 2012, 17). In short, Wright and Brighouse show that neat polemic attacks of contemporary developments do not suitably account for broad increases in living standards as well as changes in the labour structure where ‘earning polarization’ routinely decreases the chance for upward social mobility. This indicates that one must pay close attention to the transformation of the structure of inequality. In other words, the nature of capitalism. For Mankiw, and Goldin and Katz, inequality is considered harmful only to the extent to which it destabilizes growth, investments and the reproduction of suitable conditions for capital. But this is a morally shallow treatment of the harms of inequality, and prematurely brackets off the extent to which capitalism is itself to blame for the inequality with which they are concerned. Building upon research he did with Emmanuel Saez on tax returns (Piketty and Saez 2006), Thomas Piketty provides a long view of the changing shape of income distribution and exploitation. One element traces the already well-​known relative rise and fall of incomes over time, and their political influences thereof, ranging from unionization to reregulatory exercises. The highlight is that since 1980 the 1% share of income has doubled, the 0.1% share has tripled and the 0.01% share has quadrupled; Piketty statistically shows how money begets money and the rich get richer. With brevity in mind, Piketty has two main findings. First, that the return on capital is higher than the growth of income –​the notable r>g phenomenon, a ‘process by which wealth is accumulated and distributed’. Put another way, the determinants of inequality and the concentration of wealth are that returns on assets exceed the growth rate (Piketty 2014, 24). He argues that ‘the more perfect the capital market (in the economist’s 120

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sense), the more likely r is to be greater than g’ (Piketty 2014, 24). So the share of global wealth held by a tiny fraction of the population rises much more rapidly than average global incomes. Similarly, retirees’ pension plans accumulate at the rate of assets. All this factors into the flow of inheritances, a kind of distribution of assets through time, that further exacerbates the concentration of wealth. This is not some ‘market imperfection’, but rather a feature of capitalist markets. Piketty’s second finding is that returns have always been higher than growth, resulting in ever greater levels of inequality. Through a system of rentiership, capital tends to produce ever greater levels of inequality as time passes. One reason why the Gini coefficient in advanced Western countries is not like the Gilded Age is because of several decades of strong sustained growth in the post-​war period that managed to decrease the r>g ratio. However, with growth rates slowing and the changing shape of the economy (a jobless recovery post-​recession and so on), these findings suggest that capitalism will return to its 19th-​century form of dynastic wealth soon. Piketty projects that slowing a growth rate may reveal a tendency in capitalism to an r>g ratio of near 700% (2014, 196). This ratio was the norm from 1700 to 2012, and deviations –​particularly in the post-​war period –​are exceptions (Piketty 2014, 13). Piketty’s policy prescriptions are akin to those of an ordinary social democrat: advocating for social protections and public investment into public goods. Even famed calls to reinstate taxes of 80% on annual incomes over $1 million neglects that this system was fraught with loopholes. With more advanced techniques for laundering money developed since then, returning to these rates would not adequately address the problem Piketty has identified. If the problem is that the rate of return on private assets is too high, then it would be more desirable to lower this rate by raising minimum wages, supporting unionization and collective bargaining, and including dividend yields as personal capital gains. These actions would lower the return on investments that exploit labour. Other options range from the creation of public lenders and savings accounts to the enforcement of antitrust laws to break up cartels and collusions. Piketty’s work additionally suggests extending estate tax. There are several benefits to this kind of policy, ranging from adding to state revenue for welfare services to directly hampering outsized fortunes and blocking the formation of family dynasties. While some on the radical left hold that social security is a tool of social control, this view neglects how social protections were invented by workers and unions when they established mutual societies to protect themselves from the misfortune created by the market. This was particularly important when the franchise had a property qualification. When social security became institutionalized, it provided a buttress to private property, thereby supporting newly enfranchised workers to organize as citizens. In this way 121

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the system was a tangible outcome of the ‘double movement’ to reconfigure power relations between capital and labour. Piketty’s findings underscore that the development of inequality is solely about political choices, and nods towards an understanding of the economy that is grounded in historically specific social relations between groups with conflicting structural interests. For this reason, conservative respondents have complained that Piketty’s data are incomplete and thus flawed: ‘not everyone files a tax return, not all income is taxable’, as one commenter put it (Reynolds 2006). Fair enough, but these trite quibbles are not refutations. Indeed, they are so minor as to be inconsequential and harmless to the overall analysis, besides which they are unrelated to the argument that extreme social inequalities are matters of power differentials, these coming from the politics in a class society. But minor empirical quibbling like this is very much the point. Conservatives have sought to discredit Piketty’s work without advancing alternative explanations. These quibbles are meant to move the issue away from curbing inequality. This is because they do not agree with, or care that, the concentration of wealth and oligarchy is a normatively harmful thing. For example, in a review of Piketty, Tyler Cowen (2014) attacks the global wealth tax proposal with the following proclamation: ‘The simple fact is that large wealth taxes do not mesh well with the norms and practices required by a successful and prosperous capitalist democracy.’ But in flaunting his certitude, Cowen illustrates how conservatives are attempting to refute an empirical finding by saying that they have a worldview which does not even permit the prospect of it being true –​for if it were true, it would compel government intervention to right these wrongs, an outcome that is verboten for their social interests. Marxists have also offered up critiques of Piketty. For example, while giving him much credit for research, David Harvey thinks that Piketty’s argument ‘rests on a mistaken definition of capital’, and is thus ‘seriously flawed’ (2014) He explains: ‘Capital is a process not a thing. It is a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money often, but not exclusively through the exploitation of labor power’ (Harvey 2014). Marx defined capital as the means of control of the means of production by the dominant class. It is a kind of power regarding the presumed right to make decisions about and to extract surplus value from the worker. Marx also viewed capital as necessarily dynamic, constantly promoting an ongoing revolution of its own means of production in the pursuit of ever-​expanding value. By contrast, Piketty defines capital as the totality of physical objects, including their potential to be traded, irrespective of whether they are currently productive or not. He also excludes labour as a kind of capital. The difficulty here is how to determine the value of these things without it being a financial rendering of capital. There is nothing incorrect with Piketty’s definition of capital per se, but what it does do, Harvey argues, is create a 122

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statistical regularity that ‘disguises more than it reveals about the class politics involved’ (2014). Harvey continues by adding that ignoring class conflicts gives Piketty no immediate way to see the political mechanics behind the decline in the labour share of income since the 1970s through the imposition of the neoliberal agenda; nor how the driving down of wages meant that expanded credit and mortgages were required to finance demand, and how this factored into the 2008 recession. In short, Harvey charges Piketty with neither fully appreciating the power struggle between capital and labour, nor how capital has successfully reduced the strength of the working classes despite high growth rates in the post-​war period. These are reasonable criticisms. However, I think Harvey offers an ungenerous critique of Piketty’s focus on inheritance. Given their purchasing power, the rich can raise their children in ways that near ensure that they will disproportionately become rich themselves. As Matt O’Brien’s (2014) summary of research makes clear, ‘poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong’. This is because of the kind of advantage that accrues due to the benefits of intergenerational wealth which was accrued through the exploitation of labour. It is for this reason that Piketty points to the consequential problems of inequality when growth rates slow, as inherited wealth becomes a key mechanism the rich use in class struggle, in turn delimiting the kinds, quantity and quality of opportunities for poor persons.

Some limitations of Marxism In capitalism, value is a social relation that has functional consequences for almost all parts of a society. Colin Barker provides an excellent summary of this process: Value passes through phases of production (where surplus-​value is generated), of realisation and of distribution in repeated circuits of expanded societal reproduction that incorporate and subordinate ever-​ widening fields of human social activity. Its motion is dependent on conditions which are not directly subject to the laws and assumptions of market exchange. Marx extensively discusses one of these, the ‘hidden abode’ of production, where labour power purchased in the market-​ place loses its freedom and is subjected to the despotic rule of capital as its energies are converted into abstract labour. Here liberty and equality end, and subordination reigns. Unfreedom, in various guises, is a necessary underpinning of capitalist reproduction. (Barker nd) As Barker describes it, value theory is a theory of capital and capitalism. Provided capitalism remains active, shared prosperity will not be possible. This 123

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is because all efforts to promote egalitarianism and other kinds of political economies from arising will be entangled by contradictions, antagonisms and struggles. Barker’s points illustrate why revisiting value is important, and why it does not belong in the dustbin of 20th century traditional Marxist. I tend to agree with Geoff Mann that while in the ‘ “labour theory of value” –​the centrality of value per se is not a given’, nevertheless, ‘value theory remains a necessary concern for the critique of capitalism today, a necessity produced by a set of categorical, and hence political commitments’ (Mann 2016, 8). The elegance of this statement may be a departure from the orthodox rendering of value struggles, but it is precisely for this reason that I think there is merit in giving it further consideration. To begin, I understand Mann’s argument to be that attention to value is one of several pressing social and philosophical issues for a Marxist analysis of the definite and infinite political goals that emerge out of a consideration of stakes and venues. There is another reason this line of argument is important. Moishe Postone remarks that critiques whose ‘horizon’ is set on ‘distribution’ miss ‘historical dynamics and global structural change’ (2012, 2). There is great utility in drawing upon radical political-​economic literature to better conceptualize the role of luck in sustaining inequalities. However, there is a caveat. I agree with Postone that ‘it would be a mistake to resuscitate traditional Marxism’ (2003, 97). Clearly fatigued with traditional Marxism, Postone undertakes his own epistemological break to chart an analytical point of departure. I take him to say that he is not concerned with Marxism’s rituals and catechism, that is, tradition for tradition’s sake, or efforts to flirt with bourgeois scientific pretensions. Indeed, coherent archival sanctity is less important than critique becoming a material force with vitality and energy; one that can best focus attention on exploitation, oppression and alienation. In other words, I find Marxist eschatology to be intellectually dispiriting and politically unproductive. Over the past century the philosophical ground devoted to such issues has been so well tilled that one hesitates to dig into it again. Yet, in my view, it is worth taking a moment to rehearse once more some of the key reasons why traditional Marxism has been impatient with discussions of moral commitments and normative arguments, egalitarian or otherwise. On this point, I am persuaded by Cohen’s (2000) identification of three problematic currents within mainstream Marxist thought. These are the doctrine of historical materialism, the role of the proletariat as a universal class subject and the belief that the abolition of scarcity is possible. To Cohen’s list I would add the presumption that ethics is ideology, that a critique of capitalist exploitation does not require a moral theory and the suspicion of the extent of possible moral amelioration within capitalism. Together, in my view, these predispositions have led traditional Marxism to pay insufficient attention 124

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to the moral transition costs to a post-​capitalist society and contribute to a failure to acknowledge non-​economic forms of justice. Cohen begins his exposition of the absences of moral theory in Marxism with a consideration of the teleological reasoning found in orthodox interpretations of historical materialism. History is in a state of becoming where the truth of the present can only be understood against the potential of the future. More importantly, and especially in Soviet interpretations of historical development, this process of becoming is supposedly guided by a logic that has moved social life to progressively higher forms of social organization, which will ultimately culminate in human emancipation through the socialization of the means of production. In its most mechanical rendering this gives the historical process a direction that can sometimes seem outside the realm of human agency. If history will ultimately provide the transcendence of alienation and inequality, then there is no need to specify the conditions, attributes and contents of equality. Philosophical speculation and debate are pointless when world historical forces unfold according to a predetermined logic. By the same token, moral judgement is sanctimonious because social roles and their actions are determined not by persons themselves but rather by laws of history. When the revolution comes, the various class positions in society will be reorganized and reallocated in accordance with the society at the time. Therefore, all that is required of people is that they ‘show up’ and are prepared to act when the opportunity presents itself. Cohen refers to this as ‘the obstetric view’, where you help birth the next historical development. In the meantime, excessive concerns with ethics, ideals, norms and basic theories of justice distract from organizing and preparing for the historical moment. But, given that this mechanical reading of historical materialism is a discredited understanding of social change, even for many contemporary Marxists, Cohen argues that the Marxist tradition needs to develop an ideal theory of justice. In his view, an incapacity or unwillingness to do so has weakened the Marxist tradition. This is so not only because it diminishes, neglects and obscures human agency, but also because it provides no help in making determinations between difficult choices, assessing how to achieve equality or determining what species of egalitarianism is suitable. Brighouse and Wright are somewhat more circumspect, saying that one should take a ‘cautious view about what may or may not be possible rather than speak with absolute assurance about our knowledge of the future trajectory of capitalism’ (2002, 219). The second problem highlighted by Cohen is that Marxists have historically paid inordinate attention to the proletariat as the class required to birth this new arrangement of equality. This tendency is not only found in the most orthodox branches of 20th-​century Marxism, but is also evident in the traditions of Western Marxism that were strongly influenced by the work of 125

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Georgy Lukacs in the 1920s. In this view, the proletariat is a universal class subject that produces the wealth upon which capitalist society depends, is exploited and constitutes the bulk of society. As such, this class has the most to benefit from equality as well as being best positioned to withdraw their labour power and hold capitalists hostage until concessions are forthcoming. The proletariat therefore not only has the potential motivation and will for revolution but its emancipation as a class carries the potential for a more universal human emancipation. However, as Adam Przeworski (1985) argues, working-​class movements rarely adopt this role because they lack the power to decisively transcend capitalism. These movements therefore seek a ‘class compromise’, where their power to damage capitalism is acknowledged and concessions are proportionately granted, such as minimum wages and workplace rights. New arrangements for equality are unlikely to be developed solely from the proletariat. More notably, as observed by many late 20th-​century critics, the idea of the proletariat as the universally oppressed class, whose liberation provides an end to alienation and domination more broadly, forecloses recognition, or makes secondary, other important axes of domination in social life such as gender or race. Cohen’s third problem is the assumption of abundance. Marx thought that technological developments in industrial society carried the potential to overcome scarcity, but this has not panned out. Scarcity is a condition that can constrain abundant equality. Hence, there needs to be thoughtful ethical discussion of criteria of equality that takes this condition into account. But Marxists have often viewed such discussion as mere ideology. In this regard, ethical or moral discussions of the injustices associated with inequality are viewed as super-​structural elements of specific modes of production. In short, justice is historically situated, and therefore comparative evaluations are unprofitable because systems of justice are generally incommensurate. It would be like claiming that one kind of art is truer than another. Instead, much like Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Marxism develops what might roughly be considered a sociology of morality. And so, while it is true that capitalism does not disguise exploitation, imposes unnecessary servitude and creates economic instability, traditional Marxism has strenuously resisted philosophical analysis of such things in favour of a critical sociological account that emphasizes the historical necessity of social transformation. Again, this is not to say that Marxism has no tacit anchorage in moral evaluation. The very argument that humans are a social species implies a practical standard for moral evaluation. Similarly, Marxism implicitly adopts something of a moral standard by virtue of its critique of capitalism as a mode for producing life that justifies exploitation, co-​opts existing relations and attitudes by tricking people into giving consent under the guise of volition, changes the values of objects by commodification, and naturalizes 126

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this as acceptable, inevitable and unchanging. In moral terms, capitalism alienates persons from one another, from their own creative projects and from flourishing as a humanely rational community. This is seen variously in the necessarily instrumental relations between the buyers and sellers of human labour power, the systematic subordination of labour to capital and the subordination of the human potential of the working class to the will of the ruling classes. Furthermore, market returns are not seen to be awarded based on responsibility or fair contribution. Yet still, and despite recognition of all this, the Marxian tradition has maintained a decidedly sceptical stance on the problem of moral amelioration within capitalism. Orthodox Marxists have tended to emphasize that only limited egalitarian reforms are possible within capitalist societies. Instead, it is better to invest energies into a politics that can create space for more substantive change to a post-​capitalist society. This tension in Marxism is rehearsed classically in the ‘revolution’ versus ‘reform’ divisions between early 20th-​century Communist Party activists and less orthodox Marxian-​inspired democratic socialists. A self-​conscious concern for issues of morality and ethics in socialist analysis is a notable element of the British Fabian tradition of social reform that included writers such as William Morris and R.H. Tawney. This tradition made the promotion of egalitarianism one of the most pressing challenges of early 20th-​century socialist activism. Put simply, the argument ran, because people are currently facing inequalities that cause avoidable moral harms, and because capitalism is intrinsically unequal, it is simply unreasonable not to push for greater equality within capitalist societies. If harm can be reduced and conditions can be improved, we should do so. For example, this might mean internalizing externalities and eliminating rents. Second, the tradition of democratic socialism viewed practical reforms as beneficial because they demonstrated and incrementally built the credibility of a more full-​blooded egalitarianism. These efforts could build trust in alternative institutional forms and methods that might prefigure more significant institutional modifications. For egalitarianism to be politically successful, it had to offer well-​designed, detailed and well-​thought-​out policies that the public could scrutinize and decide to support. If viable reforms cannot be developed within capitalism, one is unlikely to build a sufficient political coalition to transform capitalism. There is also an important strand of criticism both within and outside Marxist circles which emphasizes how traditional Marxists have largely overlooked the moral transition costs to a post-​capitalist society. The costs incurred when transitioning to another system cannot be treated as mere technicalities to be dealt with when they occur. Orthodox Marxists have tended to sidestep transition costs by projecting that the costs of staying in capitalism will increase beyond the costs of shifting to an alternative mode of production. They bank on capitalism becoming popularly intolerable as well as unsustainable due to its presumed self-​destructive nature because, 127

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judging from the climate emergency, in the long run capitalism will make any meaningful or satisfying reproduction of life impossible. But there is a strange sort of ambivalence in many branches of the Marxian tradition about the increase of hardships and social deterioration that will surely occur along the way; as if, in the end, it will all have been worth it. In contrast, others in the Marxian tradition are more willing to argue that the transition costs of the development of socialism still matter morally, for the rich and the poor alike. Brighouse and Wright list ‘poverty, loss of educational opportunity, increased financial and physical insecurity, increased levels of property and violent crime, worsened life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates, etc.’ (2002, 215) as some of the costs worth considering. While production is disrupted there will likely be suffering, and ‘aversion to this suffering is neither irrational nor immoral’. It could be that presently, the costs are too high to switch systems entirely and, in the short term, less costly pragmatic reforms are more suitable intermediate steps. Lastly, traditional Marxism tends to have a monist value system (which rivals that of capitalism) whereby a society can be created to which work is done, not because of coercion or compulsion but for its own sake. This preoccupation with a romantic conception of artisanal work arguably comes at the expense of considering other legitimate values. While remedying the problem of alienating labour is a good thing, indeed a priority, this cannot neglect other kinds of goods or other kinds of values, like those associated with free play or spirituality, that may well be as important in human life, if not more important. In failing to acknowledge plural values as well as the constraint that not all plural values can be realized, Marxism has largely failed to respect the self-​determination of people to live in liberty through pursuing their own projects. The same criticism can be extended to the role and purpose of the market. Traditionally, Marxists imagine a post-​capitalist economy to include decentralized planning with minimal market determinations of action regulated by democratic representatives. Further, there should also be equality of opportunity no lower than in other kinds of systems. Further still, the welfare of this economy must be higher than capitalism and come without unacceptable loss of efficiency. However, achieving an increase in welfare may well be doubtful without markets given how effective they are at moving goods and resources through interdependent firms. Put differently, markets are great mechanisms to resolve coordination problems in an economy with a complex division of labour. Simply having a strong aversion to markets does not diminish their utility. In repairing our societies, some post-​Marxists have stressed the need to take what is valuable about markets and find suitable institutional means to regulate and limit their abuse. Hence, Marxists need to be tolerant of some kinds of market-​produced inequalities, while remaining politically attentive to their rectification post-​production. 128

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I reject the limits that traditional Marxist scholarship places upon the political imagination. While I elaborate upon this reasoning shortly, jettisoning ‘traditional assumptions’ permits an investigation that begins with questions of venues and stakes. This observation allows scholars and researchers to better identify an objective continuity that underlies the various kinds of capitalist politics and policies that proliferate and see-​saw in and out of fashion. There is more benefit to be had in framing distribution and allocation problems as ‘value struggles’. Observations of this kind can support what Postone describes as ‘an adequate critical theory of the capitalist order at the start of the twenty-​first century’ (2003, 98).

Value struggle beyond Marxism For an example of the weakness of traditional assumptions, consider the conceptualized relationship between value, surplus labour and social inequality. To start, Postone proposes that traditional Marxism uses the labour theory of value to generate an institutional critique of the criteria for distribution of income and wealth. In this view, Geoff Mann writes, ‘labour in capitalism is, catastrophically, condemned to the production of value’ (2016, 13). He continues by saying that ‘much of the point of having a value theory –​indeed, of the Marxian critique generally –​is that capital can do nothing, and would in fact cease to exist, without a world in which value in this very specifically capitalist sense is wealth. Surely this is not the best we can do. There is no rule as to what must count as wealth. We have infinite degrees of freedom’ (Mann 2016, 13). In this way, the traditional assumptions of the labour theory of value justify and lead to a theory of exploitation. This in turn generates an intuitive moral appeal to justice where maldistribution is a result of value flows and accumulates to those that do not deserve it. But framing value this way assumes that value can be redistributed. In this conception, the direction of flow can be reversed, or harnessed to redistribute the goods of capital’s class privilege to all. The consequence is to diminish, if not eliminate, the atrocities of capitalism. This means that while there may be utility in restructuring capitalism’s hierarchy or redistributing value in accordance with compelling and robust moral reasoning, these efforts are ultimately temporal limitations on capital’s computation, ones that recent history has shown to be quickly and easily eroded. Even then, there are genuine concerns that the moral intervention, however temporary it may be, will be nothing more than reasoning that is broadly compatible with capital’s impulse, thus constraining the imagination of what restructuring and redistribution could in fact be. This is roughly why Cohen says that ‘the relationship between the labour theory of value and the concept of exploitation is one of mutual irrelevance’ (1979, 338). 129

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Indeed, the entire purpose of value is to reproduce capital’s hegemony. Mann writes, ‘value is the means by which the particular interests of the hegemonic historic bloc (capital) are generalized, so they become understood as the general interest’ (Mann 2016, 10). And so, moral critique absent sociological attention to value is incomplete. Mann makes this point very elegantly when concluding that ‘value-​in-​capitalism thus cannot be class-, geography-​, or history-​neutral’ (2016, 10). For example, workers as a transnational class cannot simply believe that appropriating then redistributing value will bring an end to capitalism’s accumulation impulse. It is not enough to take control of the institutions and then do things differently. The reason is simple: doing so forgets to treat these institutions as part of the problem. Mann suggests that it is preferable to understand value theory as a theory of the stakes in struggles within capitalism. The only thing I would add to this is that value theory helps identify the venues in which these struggles are occurring. Repeating these errors simply reproduces the very conditions under which the accumulation of value thrives. Notwithstanding its many good features, I must admit that I find traditional Marxism odd. This is because assessments about exploitation do not turn on whether a reductive scientific judgement can square legitimate or illegitimate value expropriation from labour by applying essential laws of natural history about thresholds of maldistribution that desecrate standards of ‘natural justice’. Rather, exploitation arises because capital intrudes upon relations between workers and their products to expropriate surplus value. In short, while traditional Marxism can identify a venue for politics, it cannot fully generate a theory of stakes. The point is not to suggest that capital does not devalue workers. It most certainly does. The point is to abolish the social relationships that give rise to value in the first place. Again: value is a self-​mediating and historically specific form of wealth in capitalism. While romantically compelling, distributions critique misses the point, for it fails to have a proper grasp of fiscal relations. It tends to overlook the deep structure that gives rise to class decomposition and, arguably, quasi-​bonded labour through precarity and debt peonage. There is something else in the intellectual undercurrent. That being the claim in traditional Marxism that labour is the sole producer of value, and that capitalism as social structure perverts and alienates, dispossesses and expropriates labour power. This reductive analysis is also reactionary, for there is no natural relation between labour and product, so scientific laws of exploitation forget that these relations are social products that are depoliticized then naturalized. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx (1999) is clear about this when he points out that ‘[l]‌abour is not the source of all wealth’ and that ‘[t]he bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labour’. Furthermore, he utterly rejected the presupposition of natural and just rights between labour, the 130

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products of labour and their due. This disconnection must occur, otherwise the political precept, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’, would be meaningless. When anti-​capitalist scholars and activists claim that labour is the sole producer of value, using that as a reason to support a politics of redistribution, they are attempting to leverage the critique of exploitation to try to win a meaningful moral and material victory. Momentarily setting aside how this politics may inadvertently play to bourgeois moral reasoning, redistribution can be a good thing. But if the attempt to focus on the redistribution of equivalence does not specify or critique the production and hegemony of equivalence itself, then that politics ignores the historical significance of the conflict over these stakes, a conflict between classes and within classes which are the result of a historical relation between labour and product. Without an appreciation of this continuity, scholars and activists lack the ability to confront the central antagonisms that lie at the heart of social life in capitalism. A focus on continuity of central antagonism recentres the problem of capital, bringing it clearly into focus and providing a starting point for the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, a critique that by existing exposes the prevailing poverty of much contemporary scholarship that is reluctant to recognize these central antagonisms. Unless this scholarly agenda is pursued, problems like social inequality will not be mitigated, much less overcome, meaning that we decrease the possibility of creating more socially sophisticated and solidaristic economies. As such, moving beyond moralizing over the ‘distributional ethic’ requires another analytical orientation. This orientation can come, I believe, from a critique of the alienation produced by commodity fetishism and the system of equivalence it sets in motion. Where once it was an obscure argument in Marxism, currently one finds it becoming more mainstream in Anglo-​American thought. Perhaps the highest-​profile philosopher to make a version of the argument is Michael Sandel (1998) in his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, What Money Can’t Buy. Although not named as such, Sandel identifies neoliberalism’s push to complete the commodification of everyday life as ‘one of the most powerful social and political tendencies of our time, namely the extension of markets and of market-​oriented thinking to spheres of life once thought to lie beyond their reach’ (1998, 93). Together regime maintenance, the marketization of persons and the private capture of public duties are indicative of capitalism seeking growth by universalizing market relations. There are two kinds of objections to this process that Sandel identifies: coercion and corruption. Regarding coercion, as markets are not purely voluntaristic, injustices are likely to occur as people confront the ‘necessities of [their] situations’, most often because of categorical inequality. Regarding corruption, in re-​evaluating goods and practices, markets come to distort these goods and practices. Of the two objections, corruption is a seemingly 131

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stronger objection because it exists irrespective of whether inequalities are present. Rather, it attends to the alienating effects that markets produce, not only in treating people as commodified goods that can be evaluated and exchanged, but as that extends to other goods as well. Sandel’s (1998) critique is that market values have entered ‘into spheres of life where they don’t belong’. This intervention has had a moral impact on goods, altering them through evaluative practices and distribution as well as distorting us when we come to use these goods in this distorted fashion. Practically, this alters the reason for the distribution of goods, subordinating them to the reason of a capitalist political economy. If we recall Bernard Williams’ reasons for the distribution of goods, the disembedding actions of the market come to reroute these distribution patterns and reasons, often subordinating the just and righteous reason, the reason that motivates the objects’ existence in the first place. In making these observations, Sandel is elaborating upon Elizabeth Anderson’s (1993) observation that things are changed by the way we value them, and this has a moral dimension. In failing to value objects or practices in the right way, we fail to respect them; we fail to demonstrate our due appreciation and our capacity to give fair, just and true evaluations of things. This invokes the idea of due and proper regard for items, and particularly for humans when we come to regard each other. Commodification neglects that things sit within a context of social relations. The critical lesson is that value cannot be reducible to or conflated with price. Rather, value needs to be understood in its social, historical, cultural and political totality. This placement of value has political implications. Writing in the civic-​republican tradition, for Sandel, equality is outweighed by the virtues cultivated by communities, at times best expressed by the democratic tradition. Perfect equality is not needed, but in a shared common life, common projects, classes and backgrounds mix. As markets do not aid a common life, they do not honour moral and civic goods.

A reconstructed critique of political economy Having detailed the shortfalls of the traditional Marxist socioeconomic critique, I turn to reconstruct what a contemporary Marxist political-​ economic critique might look like. Western Marxism is methodologically supple and offers a useful heuristic standpoint from which to study how culture, contingency and judgement shape material conditioning. Notably, the language of alienation and exploitation has an unmistakable moral quotient, and Marxism is purportedly a clear expression of the requirement to overcome alienation and conditions of exploitation. From this vantage point, capitalism is unjust for two reasons. First, it seeks the total economization of human relationships which limits prospects for a good life. Second, 132

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capitalism renders a historically situated conception of justice as ahistorical. It is not only inherently morally unjust but engaged in practices to disguise exploitation and alienation as morally acceptable. At the core of the Western Marxist critique of capitalism is the argument that capitalism does not take account of ‘the whole person’. Instead, persons are treated as means subordinated to the imagination and will of others. The irony is that workers, and even those who direct the workers, become an extension of other people’s goals and ambitions, which themselves are directed by an irrational desire to consistently apply rationality to everything. Herein, all persons fail to fully realize themselves. In response to this, I find some utility in adopting Rawls’ distinction between procedural justice and fundamental justice which is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. This distinction renders the critique of ideology as a critique of judicial practice while preserving jurisprudence that attends to freedom, action and conduct. To help achieve this goal, I take considerable inspiration from the tradition of analytic Marxism that developed in the 1980s and 1990s, a current of Marxism typically associated with the work of writers such as G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, John Elster and Erik Olin Wright. My attraction to analytic Marxism resides in the great extent to which writers working in this tradition sought to incorporate a rigorous discussion of justice with the broader Marxian analysis of historiography and economics. There are other branches of late 20th-​century Marxism that offer standpoints for an ethical critique of capitalism, but not, in my view, with the same degree of conceptual rigour as analytical Marxism. Unfortunately, many of the insights of the analytical Marxist tradition were pushed to the intellectual periphery by the wave of postmodern and post-​ Marxist thinking that swept through Western social thought in the 1980s and 1990s. But today, in the ‘age of the 1%’, I find merit in revisiting and recovering some of the key ideas and arguments from this branch within the Marxist tradition. One important benefit of the analytic Marxists is their willingness to abandon questionable theories of surplus value and the labour theory of value. In their view, the orthodox interpretation of the labour theory of value is mistaken because socially necessary labour time does not determine value and nor does labour create value. Keeping in mind Anderson’s and Sandel’s arguments, this is because value is a judgement, not a material product. This move undermines critiques which suggest that Marxism is predisposed to a transcendental totality. This is because analytic Marxists were frank that Marx’s analysis is drawn from the limited dataset of European state formation, and that their own analyses have epistemological limits as well. Fundamental justice in this vein involves granting that persons have the freedom to foster their self-​development and their society through advancing the productive practices that take full consideration of the aspirations and 133

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projects of a society’s members. The obstacles to building an alternative political system rest not with false consciousness, conditioned needs or widespread ideological deception. Rather, the attractiveness of alternative institutional models needs to weigh the somewhat unknown prospects of flourishing (including transition costs) against the known prospects for flourishing within capitalism. But necessity projections for this alternative should be plausible, credible and achievable. If this proposal is to have any legs, it needs to provide the outlines of a reconstructed political economy. A good place to start is with some of Cohen’s September Group colleagues, who focused on developing both abstractly and empirically powerful specific causal explanations. To drive this research agenda, Erik Olin Wright suggests four distinct attributes: a commitment to standing epistemological standards and rigour; logical and systematic conceptualization; clear and explicit detailing of the connection between theoretical parts; and an emphasis on persons’ intentions. Together, these points are the foundation of the analytic attempt to elaborate upon Marx’s methods. They are summed up by Wright when he notes that, ‘[w]‌hatever else one might want of a social theory, if we want to understand the mechanisms through which a given social cause generates its effects, we must try to understand why individuals act the way they do’ (Wright, 1994, 190). The concern for the person and their situated actions is important insofar as one cannot escape the attempt to explain things away by vaguely waving at macro-​historical processes. There must be due attention to both the person and the historical juncture. In this respect, analytic Marxism implies a deep moral engagement with a person’s actions, in that they cannot abscond from their actions, intentions and responsibilities. With these comments in mind John Roemer has attempted to flesh out the tenets of a robust Marxist political economy. This framework holds ‘a commitment to the malleability of human preferences, to the social formation of the individual’ (Roemer 1985, 1442). As an example of Roemer’s framework, and with respect to class, Wright says that ‘to be in a class location is to be subjected to a set of mechanisms that impinge directly on the lives of individuals as they make choices and act in the world’. The attention to persons is because ‘to develop a concept of class structure at the micro level of analysis is to elaborate the concepts in terms of such mechanisms’ (Wright 1989, 275). In short, these kinds of sociological explanations keep persons, their social situation and their social relations at the heart of the political process. Another attribute of analytical Marxism is that it takes aim at dialectical logic. With the appearance of induction, but far from Mill’s methods and other rules of inference, dialectics seems attractive. As Roemer remarks, ‘things turn into their opposites, and quantity turns into quality [justifying] 134

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a lazy kind of teleological reasoning’. Glibly, he continues, ‘developments occur because they must in order for history to be played out as it was intended. Thus state actions are explained by their effect of propping up existing regimes; capitalism foments racism and sexism among the working class because those ideologies weaken working-​class power and strengthen capitalist power; schools mis-​educate working-​class children in order to maintain bourgeois power’ (Roemer 1985, 1439). This passage underscores Cohen’s argument to discard dialectical materialism and one-​dimensional historical roles of entities such as the state, capitalists, working classes and capital, while affirming the possibility of causal material explanations. As an alternative to teleological explanation, Roemer contends that ‘Marxian analysis requires micro-​foundations’. These, he argues, can come from orthodox economic techniques concentrating upon externalities and show the ‘unintended consequences of rational action’ and ‘the sub-​optimal allocations resulting from individual optimizing behaviour’ (Roemer 1985, 1439). Therefore, I suggest that one goal of a political economy reconstructed along analytic Marxist lines is to attend to the consequence of individuals’ uncoordinated behaviour without the post hoc revisionism that accompanies the application of dialectical and teleological reasoning. This goal keeps collective action problems at the forefront of Marxism. In addressing this method, Roemer argues that one can repurpose the tools of rational choice models –​these being ‘general equilibrium theory, game theory, and the arsenal of modeling techniques developed by neoclassical economics’ (Roemer 1985, 1439). This moves Marxism away from empty and obscurant teleological claims and reorients it to the explanation and explication of causal mechanisms to understand pay differentials, unemployment and technological change among others, and attribute them less to the spectre of capital and more to the persons involved in the actions of exploitation. Importantly, this identifies the spaces where class struggle can and does occur, as well as account for the ‘social formation of ideas’ and ‘the formation of the individual by society’. This is not to have unqualified endorsement of all neoclassical models, nor all their ideological or disciplinary presuppositions of macroeconomics and fiscal policy. Rather, it attempts to use explicit models and critique thereof as an alternative to teleological claims. Still, there are two problems with the uncritical application of orthodox economic techniques. The first is methodological individualism: that individuals and their preferences are taken as a pre-​social given, whereas they are largely conditioned by social factors. Therefore, as Roemer suggests, ‘people do not always choose what they prefer’ (Roemer 1985, 1440). The implication is that a person’s welfare preferences are shaped under conditions of inadequate opportunity. Therefore, a study of existing needs, wants and desires is prematurely delimited. But this is not a problem of techniques and 135

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method, but of approach and methodology. The second is an impoverished view of history. Generally, the capitalist rendering of history is that each class earns its due reward. Orthodox economic techniques are then deployed to confirm this finding. Therefore, what is required is not a critique of this or that economic technique, but rather a more fundamental methodological conception of history which these methods are deployed to enforce. In this respect, in my view, analytic Marxism offers two primary contributions over other branches of Marxian analysis. The first is a sociological critique of the relationship between property, technological change and class struggle. The second is a normative critique of undue alienation and exploitation to measure the welfare of various members of a given society. One can turn to some of Wright’s work to illustrate how this project is brought to action. Whereas, for Marx, all workers were exploited, Wright has sought to refine the concept by detailing the kinds, types and means of exploitation. To his mind, there are three criteria to exploitation. These are the inverse interdependence principle, the exclusion principle and the appropriation principle. The inverse interdependence principle states that exploitation occurs when the material welfare of one class causally comes at the expense and material deprivation of another. In capitalism, capitalists cannot exist without exploiting other persons and causing relative deprivation in their lives. This brings one to the second principle, the exclusion principle, which means that capitalists exclude other classes from access to certain productive resources. This exclusion could be property rights, but it could also be technological expertise, prestige or knowledge among other things. Building upon these two previous principles, exploitation occurs when the effect of labour is appropriated. With these criteria, Wright demonstrates that exploitation varies qualitatively, and that economic oppression may exist without exploitation. Consider, for instance, when one class’s advancement does not come at the expense of another but still has not improved the lot of the economically least advantaged. These people are still economically oppressed despite the lack of appropriation of their labour. In other words, the advancement of one class comes despite, not because of, the presence of another. Wright also wants to show that there are different kinds of exploitation. For instance, the kind of exploitation faced by a skilled programmer with stock options is different from the exploitation faced by clerical workers. This is partly due to their respective positions and degrees of access relative to the means of production. So, there are kinds of workers who own a portion of the means of production or participate in the control of production. This can happen through workers’ pension plans invested in the market, stock options and shares, or administrative positions (Wright 1997, 19). To this class schema, one can add authority as well as skills and expertise. Regarding authority, Wright points out that ownership over the means of 136

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production provides the discretion to hire and fire employees. Production requires not only economic capital but the management thereof. Often capitalists delegate authority to subordinate managers, but given their status as workers, capitalists must provide high salaries to buy them off. Regarding skills and expertise, apart from differential talent, these are limited by scarce opportunities and the high cost of acquiring credentials. Class structure is even more complicated when one considers that a person can hold multiple class positions. As an example, consider a programmer who works for a company, but who also has a small internet business which employs a few staff members. She would occupy two different class positions. A person could also have mediated class positions. Our programmer could have friends who own bigger businesses and friends who are simply workers. Via empathy and friendship, the programmer could affiliate with their class concerns. Similarly, via familial relations, one can have affiliated class concerns. Lastly, suppose our programmer’s internet business grew to the point that she could leave her job even if her total income might not increase. The programmer’s class position has changed, although she could still affiliate with her previous class position. This breakdown of class formation does not fragment the concept or dilute its explanatory power. Rather, it does the opposite. Reconstructed in this fashion, it offers the opportunity to provide greater detail in the analysis of class consciousness as it relates to class struggle as a kind of collective action. Moreover, when this typology is combined with the techniques of orthodox economics, it gives an enhanced set of conceptual tools to identify where class struggle, bargaining and collective action are possible, and what constraints are placed on that kind of bargaining. For example, it can determine under what conditions class struggle might be able to break various kinds of constraints. This kind of account of class struggle is attuned to how persons act in accordance with their preferences and endowments, as well as the factors that led them to organize with others to oppose capitalism. Further, this account focuses on the various social costs and penalties that limit participation in coalitions seeking to tackle exploitation and alienation head-​on. Cohen suggests that a theory of justice consistent with Marxism would take capitalism’s exploitation of the worker as its target. This conception of justice is not predicated upon the labour theory of value. Admittedly, there is little uniquely ‘Marxist’ about this line of argument; it is like varieties of liberal conceptions of justice wherein the least well-​off persons are given priority and sufficiency. My thought here is that Cohen’s target is too narrow. Rather, the concern should be with alienation of the person from genuine quality prospects to make good on their reasonable aspirations. For Roemer, exploitation is best understood as ‘an injustice in the distribution of income resulting from a distribution of endowment which is unjust’ (Roemer 1985, 1441). 137

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In this regard, both G.A. Cohen and Roemer have argued that reconstructed Marxists should be more attentive to and incorporate elements of liberal political philosophy of the kind practised by Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls and Amartya Sen to ‘constitute a desirable and just society’. The benefits of such engagement would bring the normative base of liberalism together with the explanatory power of Marxism. These attributes can strengthen areas where Marxism has traditionally been weak, such as its agency deficit. For this reason, I take Cohen’s advice and engage the problem using the resources of liberalism; much of the discussion that follows is shaped by an attempt to marry the ethical ambition of liberalism with the methodological realism of analytical Marxism. This is a major theme of many social democratic movements around the world, with the goal of socialism as something that can be harmonized with selected aspects of the liberal tradition and realistically implemented.

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Conclusion: The Tasks of Engaged Liberal Social Theory Conceptualizing distributional justice as a response to chances –​whether by equalizing them or tacitly accepting them –​is different from understanding justice as a product of providence, fate or cosmological intentions. Thinking about life chances in capitalist liberal democracies concedes to four conceptual preconditions. The first is admitting that contingency makes a moral difference. The second presumes a world of regularities. Closely related is a third point, which is the existence of people and populations who bear the consequences of brute and institutional luck. Lastly, there is a belief that justice expressed as life chances is suitable and necessary. This does not mean that the regular occurrence of luck undermines agency. Rather, it reveals patterns of decision making and causality in given environmental conditions and social relations. C. Wright Mills holds that a ‘sociological conception of fate’ relies upon ‘events in history that are beyond the control of any circle or groups of men (1) compact enough to be identifiable, (2) powerful enough to decide with consequence, and (3) in a position to foresee the consequences and so to be held accountable for historical events’ (1959, 21). In my view, the political economy of global capitalism meets these criteria. It is a discrete process beyond the control of many and has identifiable consequences, all of which can be foreseen. With respect to equality and economic activity, it makes little sense to suggest or imply that people should carry the costs of hardships that stem from economic affairs. Similarly, given contingency, there is little to be gained from being excessively mean-​spirited to those who make unwise decisions. Unquestionably, people are often negligent, but this should not disqualify them from accessing publicly funded programmes, for instance. There are compelling reasons for compassion for social circumstances. Plus, there can be an awareness of the possible causes that shaped the person and

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that contributed to their state. In other words, we must pair the contingent formation of the person with empathy for them, just as we hope they do for us. Understanding life chances requires an analysis distinguishing between predictable occurrences and simple happenstance. In the final assessment, this is so that we can increase the autonomy of persons. Presently, the well off, well educated and well placed have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to the pursuit of quality of life. But one needs to find ways to allow all people to have the same amount of autonomy. In practice, I mean that social structures require reorganization to give people opportunities to make choices that are less likely to be skewed in negative directions. This does not insulate people from the difficulties of life, but it does carve out ground for human choices notwithstanding the impersonal forces that block human potentials or blunt capacities. Advocating for autonomy is to support human agency against forces that are indifferent to this desire. Altogether, these debates involve possibilities, probabilities and desirables, intersecting the ability to calculate risk, luck and contingency. Additionally, they involve the causal imagination that underlies the thinking about the kinds of calculations that are important to make. Together, they reveal the kinds of foresight that persons and societies value. In sum, it is better to assess life and the prospects for human flourishing as chances which are structurally allocated to ensure fairness. Persons should have the same material quality of prospects, while there should be efforts to continually produce quality prospects. Such an adjudication requires an approach to contemporary liberalism which seeks to marry guaranteed individual political and civil liberties to substantive economic equality between individuals. At stake is whether the liberal tradition contains sufficient resources for its own renewal, which is a good test is how 21st-​century liberalism treats social inequality. As I have aimed to show in this book, through directing attention to how institutions attempt to ameliorate bad brute luck or allow bad brute luck to become bad institutional luck, scholars can better account for the widening disparities between classes.

Sources for renewal In his Dewey Lectures, John Rawls proposes that the task of political philosophy in democracies is to best ‘articulate’ and explicate the common principles within that democratic culture, but that when ‘common sense is hesitant and uncertain, and doesn’t know what to think, to propose to it certain conceptions and principles congenial to its most essential convictions and historical traditions’ (Rawls 1980, 518). Elsewhere in the lecture, Rawls adds that if ‘there exists no reasonable and workable conception of justice for all’, then ‘this would mean that the practical task 140

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of political philosophy is doomed to failure’ (1980, 570). He does not say what we would turn to, but it is implied that these efforts are a far cry from a genuine attempt to improve the basic conditions of persons. Given the extended democratic recession and the acceleration of social inequality that sets de-​democratization in motion, arguably barbarism has returned to Western societies. While initially committed to the view that ‘we may think of ethics as being more analogous to the study of inductive logic than to any other established inquiry’ (1951, 178), Rawls came to soften these views in later years. I tend to agree with Bernard Williams that confidence in justice is fostered by public discourse and the support of institutions to further relationships that revolve around virtues, care and community and not by rationalized kinds of obligations. Although they use different expressions and to different intensities, in my estimation both Rawls and Williams are correct in maintaining that the epistemological aspect of moral thought, while admirable and necessary in many circumstances, is insufficient to ground claims of justice. Certainly, Iris Marion Young would agree. These goals are noble but lack a historical sociologist’s attention to social development. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, a public conception of justice is insufficient, especially when it does not centre the intertwined problems of social inequality, exploitation and alienation. What is needed is a direct confrontation with the political economy of capitalism. With these points in mind, the ‘real task’ of fundamental justice, as Rawls calls it, is about deciding whether historical material circumstances can produce desirable societies. While Rawls wished to maintain a Kantian conception of free and autonomous persons entering into a social agreement, the difficulty is that nothing independently secures these initial values. They are merely choices, decisions and selections. Instead, what Rawls proposes is ‘reasonable grounds for reaching agreement rooted in our conception of ourselves’ (Rawls 1999, 306). The real task of fundamental political justice is to find ‘conditions for justifying a conception of justice hold only when a basis is established for political reasoning and understanding within a public culture’ (Rawls 1999, 306). Having established this, Rawls continues to argue that ‘[t]‌he social role of a conception of justice is to enable all members of a society to make mutually acceptable to one another their shared institutions and basic arrangements, by citing what are publicly recognised as sufficient reasons, as identified by that conception’ (Rawls 1999, 306). Moreover, it is to ‘construe the general features of social co-​operation among persons’ (Rawls 1999, 305). When asking whether the justification for the real task can hold water, the question comes down to whether reasonable political engagement of the kind as outlined earlier is possible with significant levels of social inequality. In the previous chapters, I argued that this is unlikely because differential 141

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burdens associated with class positions are not fair, nor do they create conditions where persons can be reasonable. Still, a modified liberalism can give due attention to crucial aspects of the human condition, while safely navigating the minefield of evaluative incommensurability and attending to moral demands. Moreover, liberalism can do so without the hubris often associated with rationalist political reasoning. Presently, there is much debate within liberalism on how to advance the liberal project, as well as efforts to link liberalism with the developments in other branches of philosophy, but without being held hostage to these branches. The project is not at a dead end, so it would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand. Still, as I have written, for liberalism to thrive it needs methodological assistance from Marxism, especially when it comes to providing the material resources so that equal moral status can become realized. This kind of engagement can best be seen around the topic of egalitarianism.

Beyond the initial chances in life In his intellectual work, Rawls sought to minimize the extent to which the contingency of the ‘initial chances in life’ do not become ‘deep inequalities’ (Rawls 1971, 7). Rawls suggested that ‘the principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance’, as doing so ‘ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favour his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain’ (Rawls 1971, 7). This method is meant to ensure a general degree of justice and fairness in politics through comparative elevation between the ideal and the actual. Second, Rawls’ difference principle states that deviation from absolute equality between individuals in the distribution of primary goods is permissible only where such deviation results in the least well off being better off than they would be under any other distributive arrangement. Furthermore, if one were to give the worst off final say, the difference principle could be analogous to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Here, the first point liberals need to appreciate is that behind the veil of ignorance a Rawlsian basic structure would never produce capitalism. Although attractive for its commitment to equal rights and to individual liberty in the face of contingency, Rawls’ theory accepts that the stratification of life chances are inevitable. The model also permits unequal desirability of station, however grudgingly consented to, and whatever class compromises are made. Rawls’ difference principle is not concerned with how persons came to be the least advantaged, only that they are so. Furthermore, Rawls argues that they should be given priority regardless of the reason for their position; that is, persons should be given goods regardless of their poor 142

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choices. Ronald Dworkin (1985) disagrees because such a redistributive orientation subsidizes and does not hold free riders accountable for their choices, tastes and preferences. Another issue, as Thomas Nagel (1991) has observed, is the clash between partial and impartial interests. Persons can have good reasons to assert the value of their partiality, even while they attempt to commit themselves to impartiality. Altogether, Rawls’ framework is too susceptible to the entrenched partial interests that result from the class divergence he admits. This is a dilemma for those interested in an egalitarian politics of redistribution which focuses on the production, circulation and consumption of the goods that arise from labour. Another approach to justice comes from Martha Nussbaum (2000) and Amartya Sen (1995) in the form of liberal capabilities theory. From a sympathetic position, insofar as they were concerned with the insufficient attention to actual human bodies in liberalism, their arguments are less interested in ideal distributions and instead emphasize individual capacities, like a person’s positive freedom to ‘actually enjoy to choose the lives that they have reason to value’ to reach a certain state of being (Sen 1995, 81). This might take the form of the ability to be in good health, ability to work or even the ability to live in accordance with certain virtues. Accordingly, interventions target deficiencies. There is much to admire in Nussbaum’s and Sen’s arguments. First, capability can be measured using generally agreed upon external standards, like nutrition, shelter, healthcare and education. These tangible goods are not just about the reproduction of the self but also about reproducing the self well. A related benefit is that these standards provide a means to demonstrate the extent to which they might be mistaken that they are living well: for example, a person may think he or she has adequate nutrition even if this is untrue. Indirect measures for autonomy may be whether a person’s potential is fulfilled or/​and whether they can pursue a self-​directed project, as well as the absence of justified coercion. In this respect, they have a great deal of concern for dominance, oppression and unfair discrimination. Second, there are grounds to make the case for a sufficiency of wellness to which everyone is entitled by virtue of their being human. It is on this basis that redistribution is justified. Admirably, the latent pluralism does not specify which ends are to be pursued, but only the goods that might enable someone to pursue these ends. It thus accommodates the responsibility requirement. For example, if a person has a certain capability to achieve a certain functioning, but they are negligent in advancing or practising their capability, then they are fully responsible for their circumstances. Lastly, the possibility of interesting philosophical work is still to be done by incorporating Sen’s arguments with Parfit’s view of sufficiency, insofar as one might specify what capabilities are sufficient and which public policies are necessary to help produce conditions under which the specified 143

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capabilities can mature. Indeed, it will be interesting to see at what point such specifications would rub up against resource constraints. Overall, Nussbaum’s and Sen’s arguments are in favour of a more practical account of equality than one that focuses on welfare or resources. This is one reason why the argument has found institutional favour and been incorporated into the policy discourse of international development agencies. This is unsurprising given that these ideas provide more tangible directives for policymakers and government officials. But there are difficulties with the capabilities theory when assessing the provision of welfare services. As measured by happiness, well-​being does not correlate with income or social position. As this type of welfare is not tied to income, beyond a certain degree of sufficiency, there is no return on investment in terms of happiness to be gained from a more equitable distribution of resources. Advocates of this position argue that better metrics of human flourishing should not be measured by growth rates but rather by happiness. This is the ‘money isn’t everything’ approach to developing welfare within populations. The problem with this approach is that it plays into the hands of those unwilling to distribute their wealth, and it plays into the hands of those seeking to ensure global production zones which squeeze labour costs. ‘Maybe money isn’t everything. But then again maybe happiness isn’t everything’, is an adage from Nagel (2010) that well captures this point. Lastly, I am generally dissatisfied with this approach, because it too often neglects to address the historical reasons why various persons are constrained. To put it plainly, capability theory does not sufficiently attend to the needs generated by the intense exploitation of labour and its consequences. As a result, the theory has low political targets. There is another theory of distributive justice that comes from the work of Michael Walzer (1983). Much like proponents of liberal distributive justice, he says that egalitarians tend to conflate spheres of justice by attempting to reduce them according to a limited number of precise principles. This is what gives rise to the kind of dilemma about reconciling the partial and impartial position that Nagel wrote about. Similarly, refining these abstracted principles can lead one deeper into the second-​order moral problems that Williams sought to jettison. As an alternative approach, Walzer proposes that there are multiple kinds of goods and multiple spheres of distribution. These goods are both defined and distributed according to their cultural meanings: their conventions as it were. As such, these spheres each have their own criteria for distribution. Hence, abstracted principles alien to these communities can distract from or even fail to advance justice. He wishes to press home the point that failure to do justice can arise when one uses the ends of one sphere of justice to advance the means of another sphere. Justice can best be advanced, this position goes, by respecting the reasons to produce the object or the provision of the good. 144

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While initially tempting, the difficulty of Walzer’s position becomes apparent when considering that justice is a set of cultural meanings specific to a place and time. Leaving aside the question of whether cultural meanings can be sufficiently shared to make them a suitable base for justice –​insofar as there is some understanding of what is appropriate to distribute and what is not –​the more critical question concerns the excessively relative trappings of Walzer’s argument. In other words, the sphere of justice argument attempts to justify existing practices. But such a view leaves little room for cultural meanings to be mistaken. The internal coherence of a set of ideas matters little if they cannot be supported by external evidence. For these reasons, Iris Marion Young (1990) and Elizabeth Anderson (1999) rightly criticize Walzer for lacking a critical stance on the practice, traditions and communities that the spheres of justice argument invoke. Instead, Anderson and Young favour a degree of sufficiency to meet people’s basic needs and advance their projects. This sufficiency is less attentive to a person’s conduct and more attentive to their social relation and the social structure in which these relations are situated. Accordingly, their philosophy suggests a politics concerned with removing domination, oppression and unfair discrimination. The benefit of this approach does not require that every inequality be remedied or that all differential luck be neutralized, only the ones that affect life chances. Anderson’s and Young’s comments are worthwhile and reiterate an expanded conception of equality where unjustified domination, blatant oppression and unfair discrimination are considered irrational. This is an approach I endorse.

The capability-​priority principle Arising from disagreement with Rawls and Nagel, Parfit and Nussbaum, I have sought to offer an alternative approach to conceptualize and demonstrate the unfairness of exploitation predicated upon structural oppression. Drawing upon Williams’ and Cohen’s comments upon and contributions to moral and political philosophy, I advance a ‘luck egalitarianism’ argument as a more suitable model to identify, assess and overturn existing social inequalities. The underlying appeal of luck egalitarianism is to demonstrate that much of what a person seeks to claim as their own is radically contingent; what remains is the material dividends of social relations. Considering these factors, I seek to aid the analysis of social inequalities by advocating for the capability-​priority principle of distribution. This principle is informed by Cohen’s unrelenting criticism of liberal politics. Strongly influenced by Marx’s claim that a person becomes alienated when the natural relationship between their products and their labour is disrupted by the imposition of exchange value and commodification, Cohen explains social inequality as a by-​product of equivalence and alienation. This is a goal I endorse, and a goal that can best be achieved via implementing 145

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the ‘capability-​priority principle’. This principle is a more succinct, if less elegant, expression of Marx’s (1999) formulation of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ found in the Critique of the Gotha Program. Indeed, as this book has argued, there is some value in drawing upon Marxian categories to think about the production of fortune and misfortune. As an ‘equality-​promoting approach’, the capability-​priority principle can be used to assess and demonstrate the degree to which the structural distribution of chance is a matter of justice, in part because governors allocate chance or allow chance to matter. Indeed, the substantive promise of this principle is to add a lodestar that is immediately practical, attentive to class and favourable to the kinds of egalitarian aspirations and proposals I detailed in the preceding chapters. Most importantly, this principle can be used to assess and arbitrate the normative merits of institutional governance and so are helpful when undertaking an ethical evaluation of political practices. Finally, and although I have not done so in this book, it is my view that the equality-​promoting capability-​priority principle can be derived from, and supported by, Derek Parfit’s (2011) moral reasoning. For example, his convergence model presented in On What Matters drew together three notable principles, suggesting that they are routes to a ‘summit’. The first is rule consequentialism, wherein ‘everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance would make things go best’. The second is Rawls’ Kantian contractualism, wherein ‘everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will, or choose’. Third is Scanlon’s modern contract theory, wherein ‘everyone ought to follow the principles that no one could reasonably reject’ (see Parfit 2011, 21–​3). Putting these together, Parfit’s principle is that ‘an act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable’ (Parfit 2011, 413). He then tested this unique convergence principle against moral dilemmas to establish fresh grounds for moral inquiry. Nevertheless, central to these routes is the idea of the removal of unjustified coercion and servitude, topics that are of great concern for any society aspiring towards democratic life and conditions people need if they are to fully become themselves.

Equality-​promoting approaches for democratic life Returning to the main topics and themes, in different ways and at different points in this book I have suggested that liberalism requires greater sensitivity to the role that structures play in concretizing contingency, and how these same structures naturalize, mystify and individuate the arbitrariness of fortune to blur questions about the organization of the capitalist political economy. As a result, features of this polity like a private property regime are typically treated in an ahistorical manner, disincentivizing critique and encouraging 146

Conclusion

people to accept their lot in life, a lot that is statistically likely to be in the working class confronting precarity and subject to all manner of social ills. On paper, and even to a degree in practice, the liberal view of the world has an ethical inheritance that welcomes amending items when truths are revised. Given the perniciousness of how frequently ‘talent’ is confused with ‘market price’, there are grounds for liberalism to start a project of using historical material analysis of how social situations have come about. For example, a person can command a price for skills irrespective of the inherent value of those skills. Some people are fortunate to live in a kind of society where they can command high fees, whereas if they lived in another society their skills may well no longer be required, no matter how refined or developed they happen to be. Similarly, in contemporary capitalism, some talented people go unrecognized because their skills are not profitable. As I have framed it, luck egalitarianism emphasizes not only the contingency of skills but also the contingency of the labour market in which these skills are evaluated. While a person can take pride in his or her skills, and should take satisfaction in refining them, this has little to do with assessments of personal worth vis-​à-​vis the presence of talents or lack thereof. In other words, being able to command high fees for having talents is not an item for boasting, nor is being unable to command high fees for talents an item for shame. Indeed, many ‘talents’ are little more than being able to satisfy the beck and call of the rich. A more even distribution of wealth would erase certain kinds of talents. Furthermore, merely because a skill cannot command a particularly high fee in the market, it does not follow that that skill is worthless. For example, blacksmithing is still a difficult skill and admirable despite there being little market demand. The underlying point is that it is a mistake to exclusively assess the value of goods and skill by their potential for exchange. While acknowledging that a person may labour to refine their skills, luck egalitarians assert that the contingency of a person’s talents and capacities shapes a person’s ability and propensity to labour. This would apply to the relevant opportunities and facilities to develop these talents as well. This is because few luck egalitarians want to redistribute talents per se. Rather, most seek to equalize for the effects of talent that arise from capitalist social relations. To me, equality-​promoting approaches can do this best. Returning to a point raised in Chapter 1, one virtue of equality-​promoting approaches is that they can be used by a variety of differently placed social groups to build broad-​based coalitions that aim to directly tackle the sources of social inequality. As I mentioned, this would occur through the use of a shared vocabulary to comprehend the mystification of misfortune and the naturalization of fortune as these relate to the general dynamics of capitalism. As a political project, equality-​promoting approaches can seek to redistribute the fruits of good brute luck, while seeking to lessen the burdens of bad 147

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brute luck. This project is essentially relational. Furthermore it stresses that political subordination of the kind caused by wide social inequality jeopardizes social cohesion. This circumstance will certainly have dire consequences for each person’s deliberative autonomy to act with wider social considerations in mind. Social cooperation, self-​determination and non-​subordination –​the core ideals of relational equality –​cannot be fulfilled if justice does not redistribute the burdens and benefits of society across persons who engage in this cooperation. For me, this means a society intent on creating quality prospects for its members. However, given capital’s penchant to exploit human relationships in a particularly predictable manner, there are no actual prospects for many human lives to be otherwise. For this reason, freedom and liberty imply the material resources to facilitate the ability to act otherwise. But liberty of this kind simply cannot exist in a society coloured by capitalist exploitation and entrenched class barriers. The capability-​priority principle has direct implications for the redistribution of material goods and services, in that it should be used to develop the capacities to provide for those that need it the most. So to me, the real task of engaged political philosophy seeks full, equal, free and autonomous participation of all in public and democratic life as well as decision-​making procedures so that we can better know what needs must be met. The liberal view of the world can do this job and do it well, provided of course it focuses on squarely partaking in the critique of the capitalist political economy.

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159

Index A abundance  126 accountability  36 see also responsibility Acemoglu, Daron  117–​118, 120 advantages, equal access to  95 agency  61, 140 agent-​neutral reasons  68 agent-​relative reasons  68 agora  111, 112 alienation  27–​29, 57, 132–​133 Aluko, Sam  90 analytical Marxism  133–​137 Anderson, Elizabeth  12–​14, 145 Aristotle  72–​73, 74 auctions  93–​94 austerity politics  4 authoritarian turn  38 authority  136–​137 autonomy  140 Autor, David  117–​118, 120 B Barker, Colin  123–​124 Bauman, Zygmunt  107–​112 Beck, Ulrich  101–​104 Bell, Daniel  38 Bell, Derrick  45 Bernanke, Ben  7 Brian, Barry  97 Brighouse, Harry  119–​120, 128 brute luck  10, 35, 74, 93 Buber, Martin  49 Buffett, Warren  7 bureaucracy  53, 57 C capabilities theory  143–​144 capability-​priority principle  xi, 19, 145–​146, 148 capital  122–​123 capitalism  benefits of  115 contemporary Marxist approach  132–​137

egalitarianism in context of  15–​17 explaining inequalities of  116–​123 and inequality  4 limitations of traditional Marxism  123–​129 limited liberal critique of  xi problems of  19–​20, 115–​116 and value theory  129–​131 Chamberlain, Wilt  85 chance  21 see also life chances choice  35–​36 choice-​making capacity  95 citizen-​subjects, voice of  50 civic republicanism  54 civil order  26 Clark, Michael  78 class  and exploitation  136–​137 multiple positions  137 role of proletariat  125–​126 coercion  69, 131 Cohen, Gerald Allan  35–​36, 88, 95–​96, 124–​126, 137–​138, 145–​146 commercial imperative  41–​42 commodification  25, 36–​37, 131–​132 communitarians  54 community attachments  52–​53, 54–​55 compassion  36, 139–​140 consent (contingent)  107 conservativism, liberal response to  43 consumption, and belief in luck  100–​101 contingency  and good  72–​73, 75, 76 Kant on  23 and moral judgements  60–​61 and responsibility  61 Rorty on  69–​70 Williams on  62–​66, 75, 76 and wisdom  72 contingent consent  107 corruption  131–​132 Cottingham, John  62, 64, 77 Cowen, Tyler  122 Crisp, Roger  90

160

INDEX

Critchley, Simon  65–​66 critical race theory  45 culture  63, 64–​65

exploitation  130, 132–​133, 136–​137 external risk  105 extrinsic luck  80

D Delgado, Richard  45 democratic equality, Anderson on  13–​14 democratic socialism  26, 127 desert  13, 61, 67–​68, 74, 95 Dewey, John  51 dialectical logic  134–​135 difference principle  34, 53, 142–​143 disembedding mechanism  106–​107 disenchantment  113 distribution  Dworkin on  93–​94 Nozick on  84–​85 and sufficiency  90–​92 Williams on  82–​83, 84 see also redistribution of value distributive justice  capabilities theory  143–​144 capability-​priority principle  145–​146, 148 critique of strict egalitarian  12–​15 difference principle  34, 142–​143 Marx on  18–​19 spheres of justice  144–​145 distrust  107 Dowding, Keith  97–​98 Dworkin, Ronald  92–​95, 143

F fate  21, 22, 139 Feinberg, Joel  67 financialization  101, 103 fortune  21–​22, 35, 72 Frankfurt, Harry  12, 69 Fraser, Nancy  15 Fromm, Erich  45 Fukuyama, Francis  39–​40 fundamental justice  29–​33, 133–​134, 141

E econometric models  11, 19, 24 education  117–​119 egalitarianism  34, 35, 81 see also luck egalitarianism ‘end of history’ hypothesis  39–​40 End of Ideology, The (Bell)  38 envy test  93–​94 equality  of access to advantage  95 and compassion  139–​140 libertarian objections to  84–​87 of opportunity  83–​84 and partiality  88–​90 of resources  92, 93–​94 of welfare  92, 95 Williams on  81–​84 see also inequality equality-​promoting approaches  x, 18–​19, 146–​148 ethical development, and property rights  28 ethical frameworks, alternatives  63–​64, 75 ethics  individuation of  109–​110 Williams’ approach  59–​60, 62, 77 exceptionalism  117 exclusion principle  136 expert systems  106

G Gauguin, Paul  79–​80 Giddens, Anthony  104–​107 Goldin, Claudia  117, 120 good  and contingency  72–​74, 75, 76 just distribution of  82–​83 nature of  75–​76 priority of rights over  24, 48, 52 H Habermas, Jürgen  31 Haglund, LaDawn  98 Harvey, David  122–​123 Hay, Colin  47 Hayek, Friedrich  27–​28, 61 health systems  91–​92 Hegelian position on property  28 higher education  117, 118–​119 historical concepts of fortune  21–​22 historical materialism  125 Hobsbawm, Eric  63 I identity  52 identity politics  15, 111 ideology  47–​49 end of  38, 56 impartiality  87 impersonalism  109 income growth  120–​121 individualism  84 see also methodological individualism individualization  103 individuals, in reconstructed political economy  134, 135 individuation  8–​9, 109–​110 inequality  approaches to problem of  24–​27 and capitalism  4 capitalist explanations of  116–​123 and concept of luck  8–​10 historical context  1, 4–​7 of wealth  1–​3, 115, 120–​121

161

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORTUNE AND MISFORTUNE

inheritance  7–​8, 123 institutional luck  10, 99, 112–​114 Bauman’s work  107–​112 Beck’s work  101–​104 Giddens’ work  104–​107 Veblen’s work  99–​101 institutional reference groups  109–​110 intellectuals  108 intention  67, 68, 84 intersectionality  9 intersubjective agreement  32, 49–​52 intrinsic luck  80 inverse interdependence principle  136 I–​Thou conceptualization  49

life chances  139, 140 life expectancy  1 liquid modernity  109–​112 living standards  119 Locke, John  24–​25 Lockean position on property  28 luck  brute luck  10, 35, 74, 93 definition  8 and goodness  72–​73 historical views of  21–​23 inequality and concept of  8–​10 moral luck  78, 79–​81 perception of  68 and power  97–​98 Pritchard’s concept of  66–​67, 68 and wealth  7 see also contingency; institutional luck luck egalitarianism  x, 11–​17, 145, 147 luck neutralization  16, 35–​36, 93, 95–​96 Lukes, Steven  98, 99

J just distribution  82–​83, 85 see also distributive justice justice  Buffett on  7 conceptions of  133–​134, 137, 141 Rawls on  29–​33, 141 relationship with luck  23 K Kahn, Paul  43–​44 Kant, Immanuel  23–​24 Katz, Lawrence  117, 120 Keynes, John Maynard  33 Kuznet, Simon  115 L labour theory of value  129–​131, 133 law enforcement  43–​44 Leiss, William  105 Lewis, David  66 liberal capabilities theory  143–​144 liberal democracy  superiority of  39–​40 Welsh’s framing of  40–​43 liberal ironists  70 liberalism  comprehensiveness of  xii and concentrated power  10–​11 concern with rights  25, 53 debates  xii–​xiii and egalitarianism  35 and intersubjective agreement  49–​52 limitations of social theory  xi, 39–​47, 52–​57 limited critique of capitalism by  34, 57 Marxist contribution to  xiv, 57–​58, 138 and ontological politics  47–​49 and property rights  28–​29 and repairing markets  33–​34 response to conservativism  43 value and potential of  xi, xii, xiv, 140, 142, 147 libertarianism  84–​87 liberty  11, 27–​28

M Machiavelli, Niccolo  22 Macpherson, C.B.  28–​29 Mankiw, Greg  116–​117, 120 Mann, Geoff  124, 129, 130 manufactured risk  105–​106 marginal productivity  116 market(s)  Marxist approach  128 repairing  33–​34 Marsh, John  118 Marx, Karl  18–​19, 24–​25, 130–​131, 146 Marxism  analytic  133–​137 contemporary approach  132–​137 contribution to liberalism  57–​58, 138 criticism of liberalism  44, 45 and ideology  47–​48 labour theory of value  129–​131, 133 limitations of  57–​58, 123–​129 merit  7–​8, 10, 83 Merton, Robert  9 methodological individualism  46–​47, 135–​136 Milanović, Branko  7 Mill, John Stuart  35, 51 Mills, C. Wright  xi, xv, 99, 139 modernity  Bauman’s work  107–​112 Beck’s work  101–​104 Giddens’ work  104–​107 moral judgements, and contingency  60–​61 moral luck  78, 79–​81 moral neutrality  xii–​xiii moral reasoning, Williams on  63 moral self-​ownership  85–​86, 87 moral status  7–​8, 82

162

INDEX

moral theory  and limitations of Marxism  125, 126–​127 problems of  59 Williams’ alternative approach  59–​60, 62, 77 mystification  113–​114

public interest  110, 111 public/​private distinction  110, 111, 112

N Nagel, Thomas  xv, 60–​61, 79, 80–​81, 87–​90, 143 nascent society  27 naturalization of luck  9 see also institutional luck need distribution  82, 83, 84, 91–​92 neoliberal context  xi, 15–​17 neutrality (moral)  xii–​xiii neutralization  see luck neutralization Nozick, Robert  71–​72, 84–​86 Nussbaum, Martha  72–​73, 75, 143, 144 O obligation  59–​60 observer-​dependent features  68 observer-​independent features  68 occupation growth  119–​120 ontological politics  47–​49 Oppenheimer, Jonathan  8 option luck  93 other, relationship with self  49–​52, 87 ownership  see property rights; self-​ownership P Parfit, Derek  51, 143, 146 partiality  xiii, 87–​90, 143 pastoralism  26 personhood  18, 46–​47, 49–​50, 52–​53 see also self Piketty, Thomas  120–​123 Plato  72–​73, 74 plebisicitarianism  109 policies  91 political economy  reconstructed  134 see also capitalism political philosophy, Rawls on  140–​141 possible worlds  66 postmodernity  108, 109 Postone, Moishe  124, 129 power  3–​4, 14, 97–​98, 113 precarity  110–​111 prediction  22 price, and value  116 principles of justice  142 Pritchard, Duncan  66–​67, 68 private property  see property rights probability  22 proceduralism  30–​31, 53, 56–​57 producers, rights of  84, 86 proletariat, role of  125–​126 property rights  26–​29, 84 Przeworski, Adam  126

R race, and liberalism  45 Ranger, Terence  63 rationality, luck and production  100 Rawls, John  on arbitrariness of fortune  35 avoiding ontological politics  48 conservative drift  43 on contingency  61 egalitarianism of  34 impact of  xv on justice  29–​33, 87, 89, 141, 142 on metaphysics  49 on pluralism  xiii on political philosophy  140–​141 reasonableness/​reasonability  31–​32, 88–​90 redistribution of value  129–​130, 131 religious systems  xii, 46 resources, equality of  92, 93–​94 responsibility  Beck on  103–​104 and capability  143 conditions for  69 and contingency  61 and equality of resources  93, 94 individuation of  8, 109–​110 and moral luck  79–​81 strict egalitarian concern with  13 rights  xv liberal concern with  25, 53 priority over good  24, 48, 52 of producers  84, 86 property rights  26–​29, 84 risk  101–​106, 107 Roemer, John  134–​136, 137–​138 Rorty, Richard  69–​70 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques  26–​27 S Sandel, Michael  xiii, 51, 52, 53, 131–​132 Scanlon, Thomas  95–​96 scarcity, Marxist view of  126 Schmidtz, David  61 Searle, John  68 self  reasonable  31–​32 relationship with other  49–​52, 87 see also personhood self-​ownership  85–​86, 87 Sen, Amartya  143–​144 Skidelsky, Robert  115 skill/​expertise  136, 147 social analysis of luck  99, 112–​114 Bauman’s work  107–​112 Beck’s work  101–​104

163

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FORTUNE AND MISFORTUNE

Giddens’ work  104–​107 Veblen’s work  99–​101 social conflict  108 social contract  26–​27 social movements  18–​19, 126 social orders, role of power  98 social protections  121–​122 social reform  127 social relations/​attachments  52–​53, 54–​55 spheres of justice argument  144–​145 state violence  44 strict luck egalitarianism  11–​15, 17–​18 sufficiency  28–​29, 90–​92, 143–​144 symbolic tokens  106 T talents  10, 85, 94, 147 tastes, and welfare equality  92 Taylor, Charles  46, 54 technology  40, 117 teleological reasoning  135 theory, nature of  xiii Tilly, Charles  50, 107 tradition, end of  105 transition costs  127–​128 trust  106–​107 truth  32, 71–​72 U uncertainty  110–​111 V value  of skills  147

understandings of  116, 129–​132, 133 value theory  123–​124, 129–​131, 133 values  25, 52, 128 Veblen, Thorstein  99–​101 violence of state  44 virtues, and contingency  73 vocational education  118–​119 W Waldron, Jeremy  28 Walzer, Michael  61–​62, 144–​145 wealth  inequalities of  1–​3, 115, 120–​121 luck, merit and  7–​8 and power  3–​4 Weber, Max  22, 48, 113 welfare  90–​91, 92, 95, 144 Welsh, Jennifer  40–​43, 56 Williams, Bernard  59–​60, 77, 141 on contingency  62–​66, 75, 76 on equality  81–​84 on moral luck  79–​80 wisdom  71–​72 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  59 Wolff, Jonathan  12–​13, 94 work, in liquid modernity  110 Wright, Erik Olin  119–​120, 128, 134, 136–​137 Y Young, Iris Marion  14–​15, 145 Z Zinn, Howard  10

164